Exploration, Travel, Migration, and Exile

Catalog description

CMLIT 107 The Literature of Exploration, Travel, Migration, and Exile (3) (GH;IL)(BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. CMLIT 107 compares the literatures of travel, migration, exploration, and exile from ancient times to the future, from narratives of journeys actually experienced through narratives of journeys imagined in the mind. The notion of the journey is broadly defined as encompassing both literal and metaphorical experiences, including travel journals and diaries, epic adventures, quests of introspection, dreams and visions, and depictions of the future. Through reading, discussion, and writing, you will examine and compare the different roles that travel can play in the imaginations of both the individual writers and the cultures from which they come. You will not only explore recurrent themes and timeless topics, but also the ways in which travel writing can both reinforce and subvert the basic value-systems, stereotypes, or other assumptions present in its cultural context. For many writers, traveling elsewhere is a means of evaluating their own societies, as well as a means of recording their responses to encountering real or imagined new places. The journeys of this course, which vary greatly from each other, will also allow you to consider some of the vast unknowns of the individual human mind and imagination. By traveling through this course, you will have the opportunity to develop the analytic reading, thinking, and writing skills necessary for the understanding of a variety of literatures and cultures, as well as the exploration of your own identity as an individual. This course fulfills requirements for the Comparative Literature major, the World Literature minor, General Education Humanities, Bachelor of Arts Humanities, and General Education International/Intercultural Competency.