Journeys Around Home: The Accidental Explorer

We've arrived at the end.  This is the last official blog post for the semester, and I'm going to miss reading your thoughtful posts on Tuesday afternoons.  The upshot, though, is that we'll get to exchange ideas in a longer form, as we transition from these short writing assignments to longer ones.  But before we make this transition, how about one last hurrah?  You know the drill: questions and comments--composed in 12-mintue bursts--posted here, and then shared as appropriate in the in-class discussion.

Don't forget to bring your annotated bibliography to class on Tuesday!

Happy reading, researching, and writing,

kevin

Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir

This week's reading is timed to correspond with the One Campus, One Book events, notably tonight's 7:00pm panel discussion featuring our own Ishmael Hope and his collaborators on the video game Never Alone, and Ernestine Hayes's Friday 7:00pm Evening at Egan Lecture, so in addition to reading carefully and posting questions and answers in the comments here, I'm urging you to attend one or both of these events to engage with the broader UAS and Juneau communities dialogues surrounding the book and the issues it raises.

As always, I look forward to next week's conversation.

By way of duplication of announcement, I'm also pasting below the details from the handout about the seminar paper from last night.

SEMINAR PAPER DETAILS

English 418: Travel

Per the description on the syllabus, this 10-12 page paper will be on a topic of your choice. While you will certainly draw on the course texts and discussions, you are not required to write on any of the coruse texts directly.  You will, however, be expected to enter into a critical conversation, so some outside research will be required.  That is, your essay should be informed by your careful reading of key secondary materials, but you should use these secondary sources as a means to enter into an ongoing scholarly conversation surrounding the text or issue you choose rather than as "support" for your position.

Here are some of the steps that will make this paper process more productive. 

Tuesday Nov 10.  Prospectus. (optional, but HIGHLY recommended)

The prospectus should be a very quick (no more than a page in length) summary of what you imagine will be the main points of your paper.  It should gesture toward a scholarly conversation you imagine you might enter, noting the key questions at issue.  It should also indicate your position, and outline or hint at some of the textual evidence you might use to defend your position. 

 Tuesday Nov 17.  Annotated Bibliography.

The annotated bibliography should include a mostly complete bibliography with at least 4 secondary texts (properly formatted following MLA style guidelines); 2 items in this bibliography should be annotated.  These annotations must be no longer than 150 words and should contain:  a clear articulation of the argument of the essay or book, a brief explanation of this argument, and a quick sentence or two that explains its relevance to your own argument.  (As a point of reference this paragraph contains 85 words—concision is key). 

Tuesday Nov 24. Conference.

This formal 5-minute conference presentation should be a preview of the key ideas for the seminar paper you will complete in the following weeks.  While literary studies disciplinary practice generally entails writing a 2.5 to 3-page paper to be read out-loud—notably, writing to be read out-loud is different than just writing a paper—you are welcome to approach this presentation according to your own preferences.  However you present your ideas, you will compose a 3-page paper to submit with your presentation.  It will work best if you think of this as a preliminary version of your final seminar paper.  

Tuesday Dec 1.  Full draft workshop. Entire session will be dedicated to a peer review workshop of your papers.  You should have at least 7 pages.    

Tuesday Dec 8. Final paper due to my office by 5:30pm

Please submit the final version of your paper with the prospectus (if completed), annotated bibliography, and peer review drafts.

  

Choose your own Adventure: The Prequel

After yet another great discussion last night, I'm logging in to say thanks, and to post the prompt for next week.  

Just like the first edition, this "prequel" to the Choose Your Own Adventure asks you to find a "primary" text that (hopefully) speaks back to the dominant tradition we are engaging together and that might be the central text for your seminar paper.  It's fine if your text is more theoretical or "secondary," especially if this the direction you plan to take in your seminar paper. 

After you find it and read it carefully, you should succinctly summarize the narrative as best you can, highlighting how the text is both like and unlike course texts (in 250 words or fewer), and then offer a short critical analysis of the text that explains why you think it is important for us to consider (a paragraph at most), all of which you will post here in the comments.  

Sounds simple, but like before,  this should involve doing a bit of research, reading around to find the right text.  As you're doing this work, I'd highly recommend keeping a running list of the sources you've consulted.  I recommend this because you should think of this assignment as an opportunity to continue working on your seminar paper.

Finally, you should prepare to sell your particular primary source to class with a tightly organized 3-minute presentation (again, it's probably best if this doesn't involve technology, but if you want to sing, dance, or otherwise make this presentation exciting, then by all means).  My hope is that we'll not only have another annotated list of texts in the comments here, but that the presentations will also remind us that there a lot of ways to approach the idea of travel.   

Until next week, I leave you to contemplate this seasonally appropriate cover image from the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

May your warehouses be free of haunts, 

Kevin

The Last Frontier?: An Orientation

 I'm beginning to sound like a broken record here, but I wanted to thank you, again, for a great conversation last night.  Everyone is doing a great job of engaging the reading material, and each week I'm even more impressed with the level of dialogue than I was the previous week.  Consider these breaching humpbacks an exhibit of my level of excitement.  

Next week, our attention will turn from globetrotting travels to a consideration of home.  The Thornton and Campbell readings are posted at UASOnline (note that the Thornton reading is divided into two files and Campbell is marked "In Darkest Alaska" on the course website).  Additionally, you should check out this companion book to an Alaska State Museum exhibit for an material-oriented overview of the history of travel and tourism in what we now call Alaska:   http://museums.alaska.gov/documents/lure_of_ak_catalog.pdf

As I mentioned last night, we're moving back to a more theoretical approach, so budget your reading time accordingly.  As usual, post your questions and answers in the comments here.  

Until Tuesday, I leave you with the top hit for a google image search of "Alaska"--a bear walking on water.    

Kevin

Wild: From Lost to found of the PCT

Despite my comments tonight, I hope you all enjoy next week's reading of Wild.  (By way of a confession:  I actually got totally hooked and read most of it in a single sitting this Sunday).  As I mentioned as we were leaving tonight, Strayed's book will help us move from the urban to the not-urban, but we should continue to track some of the same issues we've been considering all semester.  What's the status of travel here, for example, and one that I'm interesting in thinking through with this book in particular:  how do narratives change our interaction with places?   

As always, post your questions and comments below. 

I'll say more about this as the date approaches, but as a reminder, we've agreed to remove McPhee from the syllabus and instead do a "choose your own adventure" class in which you'll present a primary text, preferably one that speaks back to the dominant cultural "canon" we've been engaging in class.  I mention it here as you'll want to do some advance planning, probably starting this week, to track down your text if you don't already have one in mind.  

Until next time, 

Kevin

(FYI: the above image is from Oprah's photo album, and it's actually the author, not Reese Witherspoon, and I'm happy to see that the pack is actually as big as described)   

Travel on the Silver Screen: Midnight in Paris

We have a winner!  As reported in class tonight, Midnight in Paris edged out Walter Mitty in a close race.   We'll watch Woody Allen's film in the first half of class next week, building on our discussion of Hemingway, travel, and expatriation.  I've posted to the course website an excerpt from Caren Kaplan's excellent book Questions of Travel, as well as short pieces from Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson about traveling to Paris in the same era as the "expats."  All three of these will help us better engage with the film on questions of travel.  Feel free to post questions about any of the readings in the comments below, or even about Woody Allen or his film, if you're so inclined.

Until next week,

Kevin

Ernest Hemingway

Apologies for the delay in getting this post up.  I started it right after class and then, well... sunshine?

In any case, thanks again for a great discussion; it was fun to work through London's London last week.  We might begin our discussion this week by talking a bit about literary naturalism before we move to literary modernism, as I want us to think about the impact of intellectual history on changing notions of travel and mobility in the early twentieth century.  Or we might just see where the conversation takes us... it went in some interesting directions last week, so let's just keep the momentum, eh?  

Per our usual routine, after you read The Sun Also Rises please post your question and 12-minute attempt to answer it in the comments here.

See you Tuesday,

Kevin

Jack London

In addition to writing about his time in East London in 1902, Jack London also captured a number of stunning "street" photos.  As a recent coffee-table book of his photographs points out, London was an early adopter of one of the first hand-held cameras, a Kodak-Eastman folding "pocket" camera, one of the the first to use rolls of flexible film instead of heavy and expensive plates. I'll bring the book to class on Tuesday to share the images, but this is a fairly representative one, and might be nice to have in mind as you're reading this week.   As per the usual routine, after you've read The People of the Abyss, post a question and your attempt to answer it here in the comments section.   

Now accepting nominations for the category of "the travel movie we should watch as a class"

This isn't the Oscars, but we are now officially accepting nominations for the best travel movie for our class.  Please post your ideas in the comments here; ideally, your title will come with a couple of words in defense of your selection.  We'll vote by silent ballot, straw poll, or some form of caucus sometime next week.

First and foremost, we're looking for a film that might help us think about course themes, but you get bonus points for suggestions of "good" movies as well as extra gold stars if you can suggest a film that might help us think about roads, American mobility (or lack thereof), and mid-to-late twentieth century cultural concerns.  

Choose Your Own Adventure!

The image here probably marks me as a child of the 1980s, but perhaps some of you also read these things?  So fun, yet so frustratingly unsatisfying.  Thank goodness for the internet.

In any case, as we've discussed at length in class,  your charge this week is to find your own critical text that theorizes travel from your particular academic background.  After you find it, you'll read it carefully, succinctly summarize the argument and the main evidence used to support the argument (in 250 words or fewer), and then offer a short critical analysis of the argument (a paragraph at most), all of which you will post here in the comments.  Sounds simple, but this should involve doing a bit of research, reading the abstracts and introductions to a bunch of essays, books, and/or book chapters.  As you're doing this work, I'd highly recommend keeping a running list of the sources you've consulted--this can be as easy as cutting and pasting titles to an e-mail.  I recommend this because I think you should think of this assignment as an opportunity to begin the process of researching your seminar paper.  As an additional side project to keep in mind as you're doing your research:  keep track of primary texts you think you'd like to read.  As I mentioned in class, I'd originally scheduled a second "choose your own adventure" day in the class, hoping that students would bring in primary texts to write about (in particular texts that spoke back to the largely dominant culture, "traditional" travel texts we are critically engaging together).  If our experiment in interdisciplinarity this week proves productive, then we could easily schedule a second one.

Finally, you should prepare to "sell" your particular primary source to class with a tightly organized 3-minute presentation (it's probably best if this doesn't involve technology, as it takes time to make it work, and time is of the essence, but if you want to sing, dance, or otherwise make this presentation exciting, then by all means... knock yourself out).  My hope is that we'll not only have a cool interdisciplinary annotated bibliography of texts in the theory and criticism of travel posted in the comments here, but that the presentations will also remind us that we should be reading widely in the theory and criticism of travel for the entire semester and that these are potentially good places to start.

After the presentations, I'll ask us to come to some conclusions about the entirety of the presentation, and we'll try to find ways to put the work in conversation with our own goals and critical questions as they are developing in relation to travel.

Which is all to say:  I'm really excited to see what y'all are finding and I'm especially looking forward to hearing about it next week.

Good luck, and, as always, feel free to contact me with questions, comments, anxieties, etc.

kevin

PS I leave you with another gem from the find folks at Bantam Books...

Theorizing Travel: Key Terms and Classic Critical Texts

  

Thanks again for a truly stellar discussion last night.  I'm impressed with everyone's contributions and engagement with the course texts and themes this early in the semester.  I think the excellent work on the blog posts helped us have such a good conversation, so keep up the good work with your 12-minute writes. 

The readings will shift toward the theoretical for the next two weeks. This week's reading assignment, posted as .pdfs at UASOnline, should allow us to return to some of the questions surrounding privilege and the form(s) of travel writing, while also moving us into a closer consideration of the related issues of how travel is informed by discourses of race and gender.  The reading assignment is shorter in terms of pages, but more demanding in terms of content, so be prepared to spend about the same amount of time on the reading as last week.  Additionally, be looking for citations and hints for further reading to help you select the text for next week's disciplinary reading day. Your charge for week four, again, is to find a text from your academic discipline that helps us further theorize travel.  I'd recommend doing a few searches now as well, just in case the materials you want are only available via interlibrary loan.     

Until next week, happy reading.  

The Best American Travel Writing?

 Why is this the top hit on a google image search of "travel"?  

Welcome to the blog for this fall's UAS English 418 class on travel.  As you know, your assignment this week is to read the recent collection The Best American Travel Writing 2014 with an eye toward determining the key features of the contemporary genre--or at least what Paul Theroux and the editors at Mariner Books think defines the genre.  

We will use this blog over the course of the semester to track our engagement with the course material.  The assignment is pretty simple.  As the syllabus notes, you should prepare a single interpretive question and then attempt to answer it.  You should post both your question and answer in the "comments section" here; your post should demonstrate that you've read thoughtfully and thoroughly, and it should also spark some discussion about the significance of the course texts. 

They are called 12-minute writes on the idea that you should spend about 12 minutes actually writing.  Set your timer.  Try to get your ideas down. So long as you are communicating ideas effectively, we won't judge your typos and spelling errors.  We can edit and rethink later.  Also, it's helpful if you can print your post and bring it to class, as we'll sometimes use them to get discussion rolling. 

Over the course of the semester, it is my hope that this will prove to be an interesting forum for exchanging ideas and getting thoughts formulated before our class discussions.