LIT 111(F) Introduction to Cultural Studies: Traveling Fictions: Encountering the Other Through Tourism, Time Travel, Exile

The course will provide an introduction to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis by familiarizing students with comparative and theoretical approaches to Literary Studies. Explorers, migrants, the homeless, refugees, tourists, space travelers all share the crossing of boundaries, but in the process they also reveal cultural codes and biases which their own societies instilled in them. Through travel, new hybrid cultural forms arise and the mass displacement of people leads to "global composite communities" (McCannell, 1992); tourism similarly transforms and fictionalizes the global environment through simulating/reinventing the "primitive." Examples of such colonialist reshaping are rituals performed for tourists, the marketing of indigenous handicrafts, safaris, and even constructing sanitized replicas of the jungle complete with waterfalls and a volcano. Beginning with nineteenth-century travelers to the Orient and Africa (Flaubert and Kingsley), we will trace how Europeans look at the Near East and Africa to contrast their perspectives with how colonial subjects look back once they themselves begin to travel. We will also study involuntary forms of travel such as homelessness, exile, and displacement. Texts will include Goethe's Italian Journey, Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa, Chatwin's Songlines, several films, short stories by Sandra Cisneros and Oscar Hijuelos, Behar's Translated Woman, Grass's Show Your Tongue, Caryl Phillips' The European Tribe, and Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men. Theory by Dean McCannell, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Mary Louise Pratt, Edward Said, bell hooks, Michel Butor, Ronald Takaki and others will be studied in conjunction with the primary readings. Requirements: three short papers and a group oral presentation.

Hour: HACHMEISTER