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.