English 3017: Travel Writing

Winter Quarter 2010

Brian Kiteley

Office Location:  Sturm Hall 487C               
Phone:  303-871-2898
Email:  bkiteley@du.edu
Class time:  T,Th 2-3:50 in Sturm 281
Office hours:  W 2-3:30, Th 4-5:30

This course has no prerequisites, but you should be prepared to read a great deal and write something like travelogues yourself.  The class will be a creative writing/literary studies hybrid class—meaning, it will be partly workshop, mostly discussion of literary texts, with a fair amount of in-class travel writing exercises.

W.G. Sebald:  "The greater the distance, the clearer the view."

TEXTS:

Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert in Egypt
John Muir, My First Summer in Sierra
M.F.K. Fisher, Gastronomical Me 
Julia Child, My Life in France
Alphonso Lingis, Trust
Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land
Elias Canetti, Voices of Marrakesh
Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

● ● ●

Travel books are about process—the process of movement and of understanding, too.  They tell the tale of the journey toward knowledge and play up the delights of discovery, and the voyage matters more than any one destination.  In this, they have long anticipated the attempts of some postmodern forms of scholarship to foreground the search for understanding, to shift our attention to the quest for knowledge and away from its final fruits.

 

—Michael Gorra, The Bells in Their Silence

                      

Running at night: it was madness.  I was courting death, or at least a kidnapping.  The capital [Baghdad] was a free-for-all; it was a state of nature.  Three was no law anymore, no courts, nothing—there was nothing at all.  They kidnapped children now, they killed them and dumped them in the street.  The kidnapping gangs bought and sold people; it was like its own terrible ecosystem.  One of the kidnapping gangs could have driven up in a car and beat me and gagged me and I could have screamed like a crazy person, but I doubt anyone would have done anything.  Not even the guards.  They weren’t bad people, the guards, but who in Baghdad was going to step in the middle of a kidnapping?  The kidnappers had more power than anyone.   I had been in Iraq too long.  Going on four years.  I’d lived through everything, shootings and bomb blasts and death, and I’d never gotten so much as a scratch.  I guess I was numb.  I guess I felt invincible.  The danger seemed notional to me now, not entirely real, something I wrote about, something that killed other people [the italics are mine].

 

—Dexter Filkins, The Forever War

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:  Journalists, conquerors, missionaries, soldiers, runaways, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, poets, and novelists have done it.  This course will take a look at prose written after travel.  It’s a genre as old as the epic but still alive and kicking.  The course will attempt to pin down some definitions of the genre.  Napoleon took several hundred scholars with him when he conquered Egypt, intent on a comprehensive literary, archeological, architectural, and pictorial record of the country—for what purpose: to freeze it in time, to organize (and colonize) its history, or perhaps to differentiate it from France and Europe?  It was a routine of travel writers to take along a handful of unnamed and often unmentioned extras, though rarely as many as Napoleon did.

An Arab proverb says, “Conceal thy tenets, thy wealth, and thy traveling.”  The last is related to the first—by concealing the fact that you have traveled a great deal, you are concealing your wisdom (and your tenets)—play dumb until you know who you’re dealing with.  The wealthy young men of England in the eighteenth century spent several years traveling abroad (in Europe) to finish—or sometimes start—their educations.  At the heart of Islam is the request that all Muslims travel once in their lifetime to Mecca.  We are where we’ve been.  The Arab proverb above comes from a Bedouin culture—a traveling culture.  All Arabs traveled, but some traveled further and more intelligently than others.  Americans are travelers—the German playwright Bertholt Brecht, who lived in Los Angeles during the Second World War, complained (and marveled) that Americans seems to carry their houses on their backs like turtles.  We move constantly, restlessly.

James Clifford, the anthropologist, sees travel as a part of all human life and history.  He asks, in Routes, “What would happen if travel … were untethered, seen as a complex and pervasive spectrum of human experience?”  Early twentieth century anthropologists were always on the lookout for untainted, untouched civilizations or cultures, groups of people who had no contact with the West, certainly, or even near neighbors.  In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford describes this idea in detail:

In New Guinea Margaret Mead ... chose not to study groups that were “badly missionized”; and it had been self-evident to Malinowski in the Trobriands that what most deserved scientific attention was the circumscribed “culture” threatened by a host of modern “outside” influences.  The experience of Melanesians becoming Christians for their own reasons—learning to play, and play with, the outsiders’ games—did not seem worth salvaging.

Later in the century anthropologists rejected this idea, and Clifford himself urges us to think of humanity as always traveling.  There is no culture that hasn’t been affected (or infected) by near and surprisingly very distant cultures.  We can trace nearly all of the world’s ancestry back to about a thousand Ethiopians who walked out of Africa 50,000 years ago and then kept walking until every continent was populated.

Edward Said, a permanent exile and restless traveler, tells us (in the last chapter of Culture and Imperialism) to 

Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear: what is it about them that anchors or roots them in reality?  What would you save of them, what would you give up, what would you recover?  To answer such questions you must have the independence and detachment of someone whose homeland is “sweet,” but whose actual condition makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness… Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision.  Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that is… contrapuntal.

 

This course will study travel and food, the uneasy relations between anthropology field writing and travel writing, and the idea at the heart of much travel writing, travel through human and family history.  In Don DeLillo’s novel The Names, a character says, “in modern travel there are no artists—only critics.”  We’ll ask of contemporary travel writing whether this is true—does it only react to its material or does it try to find connections between disparate places and the experiences of those places, as if they were texts?

 

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS:  You will write one short travel piece (4 to 6 pages), which will be assigned in groups of three or four to be discussed during the second part of the term.   You will also write a final paper, which should be 10 to 15 pages (double spaced, 12-pt times roman type).    We will spend much of the first six weeks discussing what this paper should accomplish.  The final paper may attempt to do something like what Amitav Ghosh has done with In an Antique Land, part travel-writing (revised from workshop piece), part literary essay, and part history—or what Alphonso Lingis has done in Trust, part travel-writing, part philosophy.   The dimensions of the parts are up to you, but each must seriously contribute to the whole.    If you have not traveled enough to have actual travel narratives to write (for the workshop portion of the course), I expect you to write an imaginary travel piece (not of an imaginary place, but travel to places you’ve only read about in this course and elsewhere).

 

CLASS SCHEDULE:

 

January 5  Ground rules

January 7  Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert in Egypt 

January 12  Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert in Egypt 
January 14  John Muir, My First Summer in Sierra

January 19  John Muir, My First Summer in Sierra
January 21  M.F.K. Fisher, Gastronomical Me
January 26  M.F.K. Fisher, Gastronomical Me
January 28  Julia Child, My Life in France
February 2  Julia Child, My Life in France—Group 1
February 4  Julia Child, My Life in France—Group 2

February 9  Alphonso Lingis, Trust
February 11  Alphonso Lingis, Trust—Group 3

February 16  Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land

February 18  Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land—Group 4

February 23  Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land—Group 5

February 25  Elias Canetti, Voices of Marrakesh

March 2  Elias Canetti, Voices of Marrakesh
March 4  Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
March 9  Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

March 11  Last class—final paper due

 

Group 1: TBA

Group 2:

Group 3:

Group 4:

Group 5:

 

A list of the 30 best travel books (?)

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