ENG 120-03 - Literary Analysis

4 credits (Fall and Spring)

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, which are satirized in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. We will begin with the poetic journeys of William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, 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” or an existential journey in Flannery O’ Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” If Jamaica Kincaid’s satirizes tourists in A Small Place, Salman Rushdie directs us to a journey that reflects on the meaning of artistic and political freedom in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Teju Cole’s Open City is a contemporary meditation on layered and palimpsestic histories of New York seen through the eyes of its migrant protagonist.

Prerequisite: None.
Instructor: Kapila