Reading Travel (P00408)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 11 ? Acronym : LLC-P-P00408

This option will study the motivations - political, historical, social, aesthetic, etc. - of various travellers and examine how they relate their encounters with other places and cultures. The emphasis on twentieth-century travel in Latin America (in particular the Southern Core) and North Africa will allow students to explore the 'historical taintedness' of travel by investigating links between travel and European colonial expansionism and by determining the extent to which certain colonial ways of seeing still pervade contemporary narratives of travel. However, other journeys studied will illustrate how writers, and filmmakers, have also questioned reductive models of travel, reinterpreted travel's motifs and extended its generic boundaries. Issues to be explored include postmodern discourses of displacement, women's travel, the self-reflexive nature of travel, travel as quest etc.

Entry Requirements

none

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Common Courses (School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures), (School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Schedule G)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : Postgraduate

? Delivery Period : To be arranged/Unknown

? Contact Teaching Time : 2 hour(s) per week for 11 weeks

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, the students should reach an awareness of some important ways in which colonial discourse pervades, or on the contrary, is questioned by writers and filmmakers. Through close analysis of a range of texts and films, the course will enhance understanding of modes of representation, develop comparative skills, and enable students to heighten their writing, interpretative and communicative skills. It is intended that the insights gained will ultimately encourage students to engage in self-reflexive consideration of their own reading of other cultures.