Mar 28, 2024  
2014-2015 Academic Catalog 
    
2014-2015 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 120-01 - Literary Analysis (Fall)

4 credits (Fall)
In this course we will read travel writing by novelists, journalists, and explorers in different historical periods. Before the great upsurge in tourism in nineteenth-century Europe, travelers who ventured across the seas in search of trading opportunities or on journeys of exploration recounted tales of different people and their cultures. In our century, tourism has become one of the most important activities of the middle and upper-classes in the industrial world. The purpose of the course is to study the formal features of different literary genres from the eighteenth century to the present. We will begin with the poetic journeys of William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Derek Walcott, which range over continents, cultures, geographies, and postcolonial histories. Travel becomes a personal quest for identity in M. Scott Momaday’s “The Way to Rainy Mountain” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” We will study representations of Asia and Africa in National Geographic, one of the most popular of travel magazines today. If Jamaica Kincaid’s satirizes tourists in A Small Place, Amitav Ghosh re-directs us to the pleasures of travel as a way of recovering and rediscovering political and cultural histories of remote parts of our world in Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma.

Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Kapila