Travel Fictions Assignments
Instructions: Check the assignment page before doing a post—sometimes there are instructions or suggestions for particular posts. In general, the content of the posts is up to you. But in general you can do any of the following:
1. Write about your thoughts on the novel, preferably with an eye to the travel theme. But please don't do an amazon.com-type "I like it or don't" review.
2. Read a commentary or background essay about the story and discuss it in your blog; if it's an online article, make a link to it. (See the bibliography page on each book for a list of articles.)
3. Do a little research and provide some helpful information, e.g., something about the places mentioned in the story, something about the author, etc. (again, make a link to your source).
4. If you have a personal experience that's relevant (e.g., you've visited a place mentioned in the story), write about that and the connections with the novel.
For the image, please find something interesting and relevant.
1. Travel Story
Due Thursday, Sept. 9. Post before class.
For Thursday, read Pico Iyer's "Why We Travel" and Aldous Huxley's "Why Not Stay at Home?" Then, for the first blog entry, write a short travel story (fiction or nonfiction), about 400 words, developing one of the themes in these articles. Try to learn how to include a picture—you can upload one of your own or grab one from another website. The instructions for posting blog entries and images are on the help page.
2. Daisy Miller
Post by Monday, Sept. 13.
Read Henry James's Daisy Miller. Post a blog entry about the story, as it relates to the theme of travel or place. Take a look at the bibliography on the book and think about including a quote or idea from one of the articles. Remember to post a comment on someone else's blog.
3. The Sun Also Rises
Post by Mon., Sept. 20
Read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Post a blog entry about the story, as it relates to the theme of travel or place. Take a look at the bibliography on the book and think about including a quote from one of the articles. Remember to post a comment on someone else's blog
4. The Sheltering Sky
Post by Mon., Sept. 27
Read the first half of The Sheltering Sky, at least through Book One . Post a blog entry about the novel, as it relates to the theme of travel or place. Take a look at the bibliography on the book and think about including a quote from one of the articles. Remember to post a comment on someone else's blog. For Thursday, keep reading, through chapter 22, and for the following Tuesday, finish the book.
5. Articles on travel: The sociology of tourism
Post by Wed., Oct. 6
For Tuesday, Oct. 5, finish The Sheltering Sky, but no blog post. Then, for Thursday, Oct. 7, read Erik Cohen’s “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences” and post a response to the article as it relates to The Sheltering Sky. Assume your reader has read the article so you can use your space analyzing the book and the article.
If you're interested in reading further, Cohen’s article discusses two well-known texts about tourism, and you can take a look at them as well; they are Daniel Boorstin’s “From Traveler to Tourist” (from his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America) and Dean MacCannell's “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings” (which was developed into his book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class).
6. On the Road
Post by Mon., Oct. 11
Read Kerouac's On the Road and post a response. You might take a look at one of the articles on the bibliography page. As always, remember to post a comment on someone else's blog
7. Articles on travel: Literary geography
Post by Wed., Oct. 20
For Tues., Oct. 19, finish On the Road. For Thursday, read the articles by Pocock and Tuan, and then write about a place in On the Road. (Try to post by Wed. night for discussion in class on Thursday.)
In the previous scholarly article by Cohen, we approached travel and tourism through the perspective of sociology. For this assignment, we're shifting to geography, and the focus will be on the places described in On the Road—places like houses, hotel rooms, bars, the movie theater, the whore house, Paterson, Cheyenne, Denver, San Francisco, New York, the East, the West, America, Mexico, etc. In your post, focus on one such place and discuss how it is described, something interesting that happens there, the "spirit of the place," how it fits into some larger theme of the novel, what it signifies, etc. To provide some context, read the following articles. They're by humanistic geographers, i.e., geographers who cross over into the field of the humanities, and this assignment is an example of "literary geography."
8. Midterm
Due Tues., Oct. 26, before class.
The instructions for the midterm are here.
9. Death in Venice
Post by Mon., Nov. 1
Read Mann's Death in Venice and post a response. The book is short, so you might take some extra time and look at one of the articles on the bibliography page. As always, remember to post a comment on someone else's blog.
10. The Comfort of Strangers
Post by Mon., Nov. 8
Read McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers and post a response. You might take a look at one of the articles on the McEwan bibliography page. As always, remember to post a comment on someone else's blog.
11. Elephanta Suite, parts one and two. REVISED: Elephanta Suite, parts two and three.
Post by Mon, Nov. 15
Read the first two novella's in Theroux's Elephanta Suite. REVISED: Read the second and third of the three novellas in Theroux's Elephanta Suite, and skip the first one.
12. Elephanta Suite, part three. REVISED: This assignment is cancelled. No class on Tues., Nov. 23, and no blog post for this week. Have a happy Thanksgiving.
Post by Mon., Nov. 22
Read the third novella of Elephanta Suite.
(Note the following assignments are re-numbered to reflect the cancellation of post #12.)
12. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Post by Mon., Nov. 29
Read A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers for Tuesday, Dec. 1. Post a response by Mon., Nov. 30. For a good scholarly article on the novel, check out Fiona J. Doloughan, "Design and acts of translation The art of textual remaking and generic transformation".
13. Sputnik Sweetheart
Post by Mon., Dec. 6
Read Sputnik Sweetheart for Tuesday, Dec. 8. Post a response by Mon., Dec. 7. For related readings on the novel, check out the bibliography page.
14. Final.
Post by Tues., Dec. 15, class time. (This is the final class.)
Instructions for the final paper:
The assignment has two parts. For the first, write a travel-fiction story of 1000 words. Try to make it reflect what you got out of the readings and discussions this semester. Think about the various themes, motifs, narrative devices, settings, and ideas about travel that we’ve encountered. Here's the list we developed in class. Have some fun working as many as you can into your story. One good approach would be to use a lot of literary allusions and quotations referencing the books we've read. As with the novels, the story might have an autobiographical dimension, but it should be a work of fiction.
For the second part of the assignment, write 500 words in the form of an interview with you, the author of the story. Structure the interview as a Q & A. Ask yourself questions about how the story relates to the course readings (be specific), what your intentions were in writing the story, why you chose particular narrative techniques (as they relate to the readings), what you hope the reader comes away with, and so on.
Post the story and interview in one post. As always, include an image, and remember to comment on someone else's story and interview.
