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Travel writing is a genre that is characterised by multiple border crossings. While travel writing, as well as travelling, has been critiqued as a 'tool of Empire' that allowed Europeans to explore, map and control areas outside of Europe, the genre has more recently been conceived of as a hybrid 'contact zone' with potential for cross-cultural exchange and the charting of transnational movements. This lecture course will thus cover a broad scope, from Elizabethan reports on the 'discovery' of the New World and eighteenth-century records of the invasion (i.e. 'discovery' and settlement) of Australia to contemporary postcolonial / global travel narratives. Special attention will be given to Western encounters with the 'Orient,' from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and travelling Memsahibs in colonial India to Richard Burton's and T.E. Lawrence's explorations of the Arab world, and contemporary discourse on refugees
Texts:
An extensive course reader will be available at the beginning of the semester at Priebe's copy shop in Segerothstr. |
