Course No: 350:625
Index #: 12043
Distribution Requirements: A1
Wednesday - 12:10 p.m.
MU 207

Pre-Modern Travel Narrative
Sarah Novacich

 

This course will consider a range of texts loosely grouped together as “travel narratives.” On one end of the spectrum, we’ll follow thinkers from Augustine to Chaucer who use travel as a metaphor for life within the Christian context (humans are exiles from Eden; “we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro”). Such an approach will help us to query the relationship between travel and writing: as activities that unfold over time and relate to pleasure, and that take cues about formal properties such as rhythm and pace from one another. On the other end of the spectrum, we’ll engage accounts of travel in all their idiosyncratic, granular specifics (where can one find parts of the crown of thorns scattered across Europe, according to Mandeville, and why can’t he see the ark if it is still supposed to be docked on Ararat?) We’ll read across genres – accounts of pilgrimage, reports on trade routes, and texts some scholars have termed proto-ethnographies – in order to think about the intermixing of religion, tourism, adventure, and commerce; curiosity, anxiety, pleasure, and greed. We’ll get a sense of how writers imagined and engaged the East “before orientalism,” in Helen Phillip’s phrase, as well as how accounts of fifteenth-century incursions into the Americas borrowed from medieval rhetorical tropes. The primary texts offer meditations on sacred and political geographies; the ways that displacement, disorientation, and perspective construct and complicate subject positions; and emergent categories of racial difference. And they interrogate the relationship between center and periphery at a historical juncture when the English vernacular – and other European vernaculars – are self-conscious about their own peripheral status, and when the world itself is understood to revolve around Jerusalem. Primary texts – many but not all of them read in translation – will include Mandeville’s Travels, the Book of Margery Kempe, the Travels of Ibn Battuta, Dante’s Inferno, Marco Polo’s Devisement du Monde, The Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve, and journal excerpts of Christopher Columbus; criticism will include work by Suzanne Akbari, Daniel Birkholz, Simon Gaunt, Geraldine Heng, Jonathan Hsy, Shirin Khanmohamadi, Sharon Kinoshita, Karma Lochrie, Phillips, Edward Said, and Paul Zumthor. Requirements include rigorous participation in class discussion; two short presentations; one short and one longer writing assignment.