Literary Geographies

Catalog description

The course uses both literature and geography, artful writing and creative mapping, to explore both fictional and real places. From Sherlock Holmes’s 221B Baker St. London and Charles Dickens’s 19th century London to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, geography is more than an artistic theme, and maps are more than creative illustrations. Literary geography explores the ways in which authors work with detail not only to create setting but to depict geographical locations. The course will challenge students to understand “landscape” as a more than a backdrop. Throughout the semester we will engage with the socio-cultural notions of “place”: home and community, borderlands and human migration, smart cities and mundane landscapes, territory and tourism. Students may practice plotting authors and their works, following the routes characters take across a landscape, or making the geography of imaginary worlds visible.