In this course we will study travel writing and the cultural, aesthetic, and historical issues it involves. As we shall see, travel writing has a long and storied past, and good travel writing deploys all of the essential elements of effective prose: description, persuasion, commentary, research, and creativity. Travel writing therefore offers a useful body of material through which to study the techniques and practices that make writing of all kinds meaningful, interesting, and productive. To demonstrate this, you will be undertaking a journey of sorts, producing your own work by responding to, arguing with, and qualifying the work of other travelers.

In outline, this course will ask the following questions:

• What makes a piece of travel writing evocative, effective, and rich?
• How, or to what extent can a place be evoked in writing?
• How are travel and tourism implicated in self- and national-identity?  
• How are arguments made through travel writing?
• What are the origins/motives of travel writing? How have these changed through time?
• What are some of the assumptions we make about travel—its effect, purpose, significance? 
• What can we learn from an historical awareness of the context in which a piece of travel writing was produced? How might this awareness influence our perceptions of the work and its author’s motives?