English 166

Other Readings and Media

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: The Turkish Embassy Letters; Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey; Georg(e) Forster: A Voyage Round the World (excerpts); Mungo Park: Travels in the Interior of Africa; Lady Elizabeth Craven: A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople; Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. All these texts can be downloaded from Eighteenth-Century Catalogue Online (ECCO), but there are also fine paperback editions of Montagu (Virago), Sterne (Penguin or Oxford University Press), and Wollstonecraft (Penguin).

Description

This course is based on the idea that if there is one genre in which ideas of identity--ideas of how one's own self and culture are related to other selves and other cultures--are systematically negotiated, then this must be the hybrid genre of travel writing, because travel writing is constituted by a discursive processing of encounters with 'the Other.' We shall look at some paradigmatic 18th-century texts, and we will try to answer questions like, What difference does it make whether a European writer travels in Europe or outside Europe? Whether alone or in company? Whether the writer is female or male? Whether the subjectivity of the writer is highlighted or toned down? Whether it is written during the journey or long afterwards? By which comparisons and metaphorics is alterity produced and processed? What is the importance of the form of the travelogue (e.g., whether it is in letters or written as a scientific report on a journey of exploration)? The vanishing point of all these questions is, of course, how in the eighteenth century Europe's idea of itself emerges from its encounters with others.

This section of English 166 satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.