Senior Seminar

This course will examine a selection of travel narratives within the context of contemporary postcolonial theory and “mobility studies.”  Throughout the course, we will be acquainting ourselves with recent theoretical work on travel, Orientalism, and tourism.  Readings of primary texts will begin with a glance backward to Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account of his travels to the East and Columbus’s account of what he thought was his voyage to the East, as well the early modern accounts of the voyages of discovery by Bartolome de Las Casas and Jean de Léry. We will then shift to a selection of modern travel narratives, both fictional and non-fictional.  Questions to be addressed include: the relation between power and the production of knowledge as it manifests itself in such narratives; intertextuality and its ideological effects; modes of representation of racial, cultural, historical, and sexual otherness.   How does travel contribute to the construction of a place called “home,” and how might it disrupt that construction? What happens to Orientalist discourse when the Orientalist who enters and exits the harem happens to be a woman? What fantasy compels Europeans to find “cannibalism” in the East and the New World, over and over again? Authors read will include Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Bartolome de Las Casas, Jean de Léry, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mark Twain, Xavier de Maistre, and Italo Calvino.  We will also read theoretical work by Said, Greenblatt, Culler, Kaplan, Pratt, Hulme, and others.