Travel Writing Course

I want to finish with a recap of what we've been doing and what you've been listening to over the course of the last three months, then a look forward to some of the ways I hope that your writing (and reading) may change as a result.

I want to begin by telling you two parables, or considering two case studies - whichever terminology you prefer.

The first is the story of Marco Polo, or Marco Milione ("Marco Millions") as he was known in his native Venice. In his youth Marco Polo accompanied his father and uncle on a long, perilous journey across land from Italy to China. That was in the year 1271, long before the Renaissance, long before the invention of printing, long before most of the technological innovations we consider specifically "Western" or "European".

When he came back 24 years later, it was with a mass of traveller's tales about the sheer extent and complexity of the Great Khan's empire (Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan). Nobody believed him, however. He earned his nickname because he was alleged to exaggerate every small number into "millions". While he'd been away, Venice had declared war on Genoa, and Marco was roped into the conflict. He was captured and imprisoned, and it was while he was in a prison cell in Genoa that he met and dictated his travel stories to a writer named Rustichello of Pisa.

Rustichello specialised in writing romances, full of chivalrous knights, beauteous damsels, mysterious castles, tournaments and intrigues. He accordingly wrote Marco's story in the only way he knew how: as a romance (you'll note his prologue includes details of the Polos being enlisted to convey two ladies to a far-off destination). As a result, it was regarded as more of a work of fiction than a genuine contribution to geographical knowledge, and it wasn't until centuries later that explorers such as Christopher Columbus started to take it seriously.

The text of his account is uncertain and unauthorised, the details often garbled, but there can be no serious doubt that Marco went where he said and did what he reported. It was Rustichello, though, his ghost-writer, who created his book, one of the most popular and bestselling works in history.

Many years later, another Italian writer, Italo Calvino, used Marco's story - particularly the account of his conversations with the Great Khan - to create a very strange work of fiction: Invisible Cities. You've had a chance to read some of it, and I guarantee that you found it a little difficult to follow in parts. What's it actually about?

The blurb on the back of my Picador edition quotes from a contemporary review of the book:

'Every time he returns from his travels, Marco Polo is invited by Kublai Khan to describe the cities he has visited. The conqueror and the explorer exchange visions: for Kublai Khan the world is constantly explanding; for Marco Polo, who has seen so much of it, it is an ever-diminishing place.

Although he makes Marco Polo summon up many cities for the Khan's imagination to feed on, Calvino is describing only one city in this book. Venice, that decaying heap of incomparable splendour, still stands as substantial evidence of man's ability to create something perfect out of chaos. Nevertheless, it's a place where rats thrive; where the dead can seem to outnumber the living'

Times Literary Supplement

Perhaps Kublai Khan is the type of the consumer of travel literature. He stays at home and retains his appetite for marvels. Marco Polo, like James Hamilton-Paterson ("The End of Travel") or the various purveyors of "Anti-travel" we talked about a fortnight ago, is more jaundiced. The more he sees, the more repetitive it all becomes.

Which of them is correct? Both - and neither. The wonders of the world are inexhaustible (literally), but that doesn't make them invulnerable. Modernity speeds up travel, but also makes it more and more necessary to assert the necessity to stand still once in a while.

•

My second parable is the story of Joseph Conrad (or Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, if you prefer). He grew up speaking Polish, in Poland, and yet he didn't - because there was no such country. Prussia, Russia and Austria had divided up Poland between them in the late eighteenth century, and it didn't achieve independence again until 1918, after the First World War.

Conrad's father Apollo was a writer and a patriot, and was accordingly arrested by the Tsarist authorities in 1861, when Joseph was four, and sent into exile in Siberia. Both his mother and father died as a result of the harsh conditions they were subjected to there, so Joseph was an orphan by the age of 11.

In an autobiographical essay Conrad records that he was fascinated by maps as a young boy, and particularly by the blank spot in the centre of Africa. "When I grow up I will go there," he said to himself - and, amazingly, many years later, after leaving Poland for France, and then for the British Merchant Marine, he did precisely that. He went there - to the heart of the King Leopold's private colony on the Congo river - and what he saw and brought back from that experience eventually became the story Heart of Darkness.

For me, the essential thing to remember when trying to understand this story is that Conrad was not British. His narrator and alter-ego Marlow is British - and is accordingly rather scornful of "foreigners", especially their attempts to run viable colonies. Conrad, though, as a loyal Pole, was scornful of Imperialism in all its forms - British, Russian and American - and his feelings about inhabiting a "blank spot" on the map can hardly be said to have been unambiguous either.

His is certainly an art of contrast and comparison. The fascinating thing is that it was by enlarging his terms of reference, by making his very real experience of the horror of the Belgian Congo into a fictionalised story, that he managed to create a work which has sparked so many analogues and echoes since - notably Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now.

Travel, in other words, can be said to be what you make of it. But the destiny of the words you produce, either by dictation to an unreliable and opinionated ghost-writer (Marco Polo) or by deliberate creative recasting (Joseph Conrad), are finally unforeseeable.

Both of these stories, for me, underline the close - almost inextricable - relationship between the reality of the world we live in and the potency of the imaginative processes we use to describe and understand that world.

Conrad, as a child, imagined a journey to a blank spot on the map. That spot, when he finally reached it, bore little or no resemblance to the romantic, idealised "Africa" he'd been longing for. What it did suggest to him was a basic kinship between all the "dark places of the earth" - centres of genocide, colonial exploitation, poverty and greed. The "city of whited sepulchres", Brussels (and, by extension, London) turns out to the ultimate "heart of darkness" in his novella.

There's little evidence about what the actual Marco Polo expected to find in the vast regions he was traversing before he got there. He was, after all, following an already established trading route. The - apparently quite realistic - stories he told about his adventures in the East did end up inspiring the entire imaginative community of medieval Europe, though. And this influence eventually permeated as far as the novelist Italo Calvino in his meditations on time and space.

So what's my conclusion? I guess I want to turn it around onto you at this point. If telling the truth were a simple business, I'm sure we wouldn't need travel literature or any other kind of literature. There's no travel writing in heaven (or Utopia), that's for sure. Perhaps it all comes from our need to find a shape for our experience - a shape that somehow makes it meaningful, enables us to understand it, provides (in the final analysis) a catalyst for action?

In any case, it's a practical necessity for you right now to achieve some kind of balance between the ideal journeys of your imagination and the actual places you've experienced. Too much imagination, and you'll end up with pure fiction - too much reality, and you'll create nothing but a dull, banal itinerary. The art of travel writing lies in harmonising the two, imagining a journey, then experiencing it in reality, but never forgetting that the effect on your readers will depend on the intensity and skill with which you recreate it for them.

•

[Marco Polo: The Travels (c.1300)]

Workshop 12:
Sharing final projects

[dual session: Thurs 1-3 pm / Fri 11-1 pm]

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.”
– Martin Buber

Sharing draft writing for your final projects.

Final rundown on assignment submission details

Final Project due in on Friday, 10th June.

[Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now (1979)]

Lecture / Workshop 11

2009-05-24T08:29:00.033+12:00

[Mark Goff: Woodstock (August 15, 1969)]

Lecture 11:
Why?
Anti-travel

Anthology texts to read:

Scott Hamilton: 'From Kalmykia to Huntly,' from Reading the Maps (2006)
Iain Sinclair: from London Orbital (2002)
Hunter S. Thompson: from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

•

Let's start with a brief history of Western civilisation. It's a bit of a tall order, of course, but I guess somebody's got to do it, if only to be shot down in flames immediately afterwards.

We begin with a fairly straightforward contrast between the City and the Countryside: urban and rural values -- the civilised and the wild. This basic paradigm for understanding the world around us lasted through classical antiquity right up into the modern era.

The eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope could therefore state with confidence:

The proper study of mankind is man
- An Essay on Man (1733)

while his near-contemporary Dr Samuel Johnson famously remarked:

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
- Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791)

It's not that these writers were unaware of nature, or even indifferent to its charms - it's just that they saw civilised life as some kind of an achievement, and therefore intrinsically praiseworthy and desirable. Like ancient Romans, they loved novelty, but assumed that novelties should be brought back to the metropolis to be exhibited.

Fast-forward slightly. Here's a quote from William Wordsworth:

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
- "The Tables Turned" (1798)

Wordsworth's poem was written only a few years after Boswell's book, but it represents nothing less than a revolution in values and assumptions: that great watershed in Western culture we generally refer to as the Romantic Movement.

In essence, Wordsworth is saying that the town / country divide needs to be rethought in terms of the country: that there's an inherent nobility and beauty in natural processes which is intrinsically superior to the values of the city.

We can quibble about just how and when this transformation took place. Clearly Wordsworth was harking back to Rousseau's idea of the Noble Savage ("Your book made me want to go about on all fours" as Voltaire remarked to the author of The Social Contract (1762)). Rousseau, in his turn, was summarising arguments advanced by Montaigne in "On the Cannibals" (1580). Nevertheless, these ideas first became dominant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and this instinctive preference for natural values over urban, sophisticated ones has stayed with us to this day.

It certainly dominates travel writing, which is a genre which really took off in the nineteenth century, as it gradually achieved emancipation from largely educational accounts of that aristocratic European rite of passage known as the "Grand Tour." Instead, a new taste for the exotic, the strange, the wild and uncultivated overtoook readers and thinkers alike. Rugged explorers supplanted courtly sophisticates as the new heroes of the genre.

And so it went on, well into the twentieth century: the best traveller was the one who can encounter a strange tribe which has "never seen a white man"; the best writer was the one who had suffered most, knew the greatest number of obscure dialects, was prepared to go over the edge into the illimitable Outdoors:

As another great Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, put it:

from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c -- my mind had been habituated to the Vast --
- Letter to Thomas Poole (16 Oct 1797)

The 1960s were perhaps the highwater mark of this Romantic addiction to the purity and simplicity of nature over the deviousness and treachery of city-life. What is a hippie but an enthusiast for the (imagined) love and peace of the wilderness?

The (alleged) failure of hippiedom to achieve anything much beyond a lot of psychedelic music and a big rock festival at Woodstock (the most enduring images of which are probably the heap of rubbish left behind when the tribes departed) is one of the predominant themes of the post-modern era. Woodstock, after all, was followed the debacle of the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont Speedway ...

So where do we go now? Back to Pope and Johnson and a kind of conservative classicism? Or back to Coleridge and Thoreau and their evangelical enthusiasm for the Vast? Where is this "Vast" to be located, anyway? In Space? (Another unfortunate casualty of the sixties ...)

[Hunter S. Thompson (1971)]

Little of Hunter Thompson's work makes sense without some appreciation of this dilemma, however localised his angle on it may be (Las Vegas and San Francisco are, for him, virtually the two opposing poles of the human spirit). He takes final refuge in the Rocky Mountains, the reclusive sage of Woody Creek, with the folk-singer John Denver as his nearest neighbour.

Iain Sinclair, by contrast, takes his cues from the Science Fiction "New Wave" of the 1960s - a reaction to the 40s and 50s "fiction for young engineers" Sci-fi of the Campbell era. The fiction of British writer J. G. Ballard is one of the few reliable guides he can find to these explorations of so-called "inner space."

Scott Hamilton prefers to explore that wasteland of the spirit known as Marxism - not so much the Master's own writings, as the various misinterpretations and misapplications of them which have resulted in our contemporary mediascape of "left" and "right"-wing values (another legacy of the Romantic era). For Scott, then, travel writing is a way of recuperating vanished histories, unearthing submerged proletarian traditions.

In other words, he too is a dyed-in-the-wool Romantic. Marxism is a Utopian creed, after all, and the problem with Utopias is that they're so difficult to find.

You can, however, do the next best thing, and try with all your might to go nowhere instead. Utopia, is, after all, Greek for "nowhere", but it can also be read as "Eu-topia", the good place.

Every account of a Utopia - and New Zealand's English-language literature effectively began with one: Samuel Butler's Erewhon, in 1872 - seems accordingly to inspire an equal and opposite reaction: a Dystopia, or bad place ... Perhaps you can only imagine the good place by drawing a portrait of a bad one (so much easier to find), and then simply reverse it! Imagine Heaven by describing Hell, in other words.

When Scott Hamilton came here to give a guest lecture in May 2008, he said:

For me, anti-travel writing is about rejecting falsified images of New Zealand, and falsified images of other parts of the world. It’s about digging into the present to find the past which can help explain that present. It’s about ripping brands off the landscape.

... In the piece which Jack put in your coursebook, and in a lot of other things I write, I’m arguing for the right of New Zealand to be ugly, or at least complicated, rather than the theme park paradise which the Tolkien films and the tourist industry seem to want to create. I’m fascinated by the Huntly district, and by the Waikato area in general, because of the very particular, very legible marks that history has made on the landscape there. Instead of airbrushing the landscape, and removing the history written on it, I want to read the messages in the coal shaft openings and canals and terraces and gravel quarries.

Underneath the streets of Huntly, and underneath the Waikato River that divides the town, lie a tangle of half-collapsed tunnels built a century ago by coal miners armed with shovels and dynamite. Every time I walk down the main street of Huntly I tread lightly, because I know I’m treading on hollow ground. Like the drained swamps and ghostly forests of the Hauraki Plains, these half-forgotten passageways are metaphors for a history which has often been repressed.

If you visit the coal mining museum in Huntly you may learn the names of the members of the miners’ wives lawn bowls team in 1951, or see a photo of the manager of Ralph’s Mine in 1911, but you will not be informed about the explosion that killed nearly fifty men at Ralph’s in 1914. You will not be told about the great strike of 1913, when drunken farmers on horseback, named Massey’s Cossacks, after the right-wing Prime Minister of the day, fought pitched battles with miners. You will not learn about the strange ‘riot’ of 1932, when the whole town of Huntly formed an orderly queue in front of the General Store, a group of housewives smashed the store’s windows with their handbags, and family after family calmly helped itself to the food its members could not afford to buy.

The fact that some of the uglier – or, perhaps we should say, more complicated – aspects of Huntly history have been kept out of the local museum may have something to do with the fact that a big mining company is funding the upgrade and relocation of that museum. But if you drive through the broken-backed countryside to the west of Huntly, on the wrong side of the river, then you’ll find the signs, the more or less cryptic messages left by history, like decaying mine entrances, blackened and condemned by explosions and fires, or derelict miners’ cottages the size of sheds, huddled in the shadow of the fine houses of the managers, or heaps of slack coal bleeding blackly into streams blocked by dynamited bridges. The past is a landscape waiting to be read.

I'm not sure that Scott understands the term "anti-travel" in precisely the same way I do, but we certainly agree on the desirability of a type of writing which is anti-cliché, dismissive of lazy conventions within the genre - knee-jerk responses, casually contemptuous guying of the "foreign."

Funnily enough, we were both under the impression that it was a well-known term for an established genre when Scott first wrote his piece. However, there may be some justification for the view that it isn't - or rather wasn't. It's rather exciting to be in at the birth of a new genre. Let's hope that the results live up to the opening fanfare.

At the very least, it's one more possibility in your smorgasbord of possible voices to try out.

•

[Iain Sinclair: London Orbital (2002)]

Workshop 11:
Discussion of Anti-travel texts

[dual session: Thurs 1-3 pm / Fri 11-1 pm]

“How long can the exotic remain exotic?”
– Granta 26: Travel (1989): 258.

Discussion:

The politics of travel to a deliberately non-exotic destination: in this case, Huntly
Is this an approach that lends itself particularly to video or photographic representation?

Sharing plans and ideas for your final projects.

[Scott Hamilton]

Lecture / Workshop 10

2009-05-23T08:55:00.019+12:00

[Gabriel White: Journey to the West (2003)]

Lecture 10:
Why?
Selling Your Wares

Anthology texts to read:

from Lonely Planet New Zealand (2006)
Eric Newby: from A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958)

[Gabriel White]

Workshop 10:
Motives for publication

[plenary session]

“If an ass goes travelling, he'll not come home a horse.”
– Thomas Fuller

Choice of publication outlet / audience predetermines certain details of what you can and can’t include in your piece.

Stretch the boundaries, or live happily within them?

[Lonely Planet New Zealand (2006)]

Lecture / Workshop 9

2009-05-22T08:38:00.015+12:00

[Joe Sacco: Safe Area Goražde (2000)]

Lecture 9:
What?
Places & Events

Anthology texts to read:

James Fenton: 'The Narrow Road to the Solid North,' from All the Wrong Places (1988)
Joe Sacco: from Safe Area Goražde (2000)
Eric Schlosser: from Fast Food Nation (2001)

•

Eric Schlosser is an investigative journalist; James Fenton is a well-known English poet; Joe Sacco is a cartoonist. On the face of it, they would appear to have little in common. If we look a bit more closely, though, I think we can see that they share a certain objectivity and distance from the events they report. The question is, have they deliberately chosen this approach, or have the diverse genres they inhabit somehow chosen it for them?

•

[Richard Linklater: Fast Food Nation (2006)]

Workshop 9:
Anatomy of an event

[dual session: Thurs 1-3 pm / Fri 11-1 pm]

“Travel books are expressions of the effectiveness of print in putting the world on show and delineating a geography of power.”
– Lydia Wevers, Country of Writing (2002): 2.

These three highly politicised texts give private adventures against a background of international turmoil.

How effectively do they communicate the drama / detail of events?
What similar issues might your own writing address?

[Andy Ross: Christopher Hitchens / James Fenton / Martin Amis (Paris, 1970s)]

Lecture / Workshop 8

2009-05-21T08:43:00.033+12:00

[Paul Theroux (b.1941)]

Lecture 8:
What?
People

Anthology texts to read:

Anton Chekhov: from The Island of Sakhalin (1895)
Paul Theroux: from The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992)
Catharina van Bohemen: 'Safari,' from A Passion for Travel (1998)

•

The lecture today will be given by Dr. Jenny Lawn.

•

[Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)]

Workshop 8:
Anatomy of a neighbour

[dual session: Thurs 1-3 pm / Fri 11-1 pm]

“Many contemporary travel narratives follow in this profitable vein, exhibiting picayune ‘mentors’ whose wisdom is dispensed like so much snake oil ...”
– Holland & Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters (1998): 13.

Creating a “character” – examples from Theroux (himself / his interlocutors).
Anton Chekhov & Catharina van Bohemen: portrait of the artist as a reluctant traveller?

Local Travel Piece due in today.

[Girl on Safari (2006)]

Lecture / Workshop 7

2009-05-20T08:06:00.015+12:00

[Martin Edmond: Luca Antara (2006)]

Lecture 7:
How?
Hybrid Genres

Anthology texts to read:

W. H. Auden: from Letters from Iceland (1937)
Martin Edmond: from Luca Antara: Passages in Search of Australia (2006)
Colin Hogg: from Angel Gear: On the Road with Sam Hunt (1989)

•

The Japanese form haibun - prose with interspersed passages of verse - brought to perfection by Matsuo Bashō in the diaries of his various journeys perhaps offers us the best introduction to the idea of hybrid form in travel writing.

Travel writing is a hybrid form, of course - straddling traditional genre-divisions such as verse and prose, or fiction and non-fiction, with contemptuous ease. But that statement really doesn't even begin to do justice to the strange things happening in books such as Audne & MacNeice's Letters from Iceland, with its strange mixture of verse and prose, travelogue and autobiography - or, for that matter, Colin Hogg's illustrated diary of a Sam Hunt poetry tour in the mid-eighties.

The idea of an author who can only compose in fragments is perhaps a peculiarly modern view of the artist. Whatever one thinks of this cult of the sketchy and fragmentary, there's no doubt that travel writing lends itself peculiarly well to this way of thinking. Travel is, by its very nature, scrappy and disorganised, and it therefore makes sense that making a complex, many-layered mosaic of one's narrative could be seen to be making a virtue of necessity.

How else to explain Martin Edmond's Luca Antara, for example? Did the historical portion come first, before the rest? Was there ever really a "Henry Klang"? Perhaps these are the wrong questions to ask. We have to understand what Martin's book is and is not before we can even begin to speculate on its relationship to a conventional (non-fictional) travelogue.

•

[Kenneth Hari: W. H. Auden]

Workshop 7:
Who might you be?

[dual session: Thurs 1-3 pm / Fri 11-1 pm]

“Criticism has never quite known what to call books like these.”
– Paul Fussell, Abroad (1980): 202.

Exercise: Mixing it up

Increasingly travel books address the issue of many-layered places and personalities by complexities of genre. Auden's and Hogg’s texts parallel poetry, images and prose; Martin Edmond’s calls the authenticity of his narrative into question again and again.

You'll be divided into groups of three.
Each of you will be given an extract from a well-known (but unidentified) travel book.
I want you to go through it, underlining any facts or phrases that particularly stand out (to you).
Now, make a poem out of these stand-out words and phrases, with any necessary editorial modifications (names, dates, places) you need to make it read as a unified composition. You may also wish to add some new writing of your own.
Swap your poems with the other people in your group. I'd like you to make a joint text out of all three of them.

Afterwards, we'll share as many as possible of the poems you've written.

[Jan Kemp: Sam Hunt (1979)]

Lecture / Workshop 6

2009-05-19T08:24:00.024+12:00

[Bashō: The Oku Trip (1694)]

Lecture 6:
How?
Traditional Genres

Anthology texts to read:

Matsuo Bashō: from Narrow Road to the Deep North (1694)
Theodora Kroeber: from Ishi in Two Worlds (1961)
Douglas Mawson: from The Antarctic Diaries (1911-14)
Douglas Mawson: from The Home of the Blizzard (1915)

•

The journey is a metaphor. Of course. In fact, the "journey of life" is probably the single most familiar image for the pattern of each individual's existence. (The river is the next most popular -- starting in the hills, then running down to the sea).

But the journey is also real. Epic jouneys are actually undertaken by explorers such as Mawson or Shackleton, but also by ordinary individuals, such as the Buddhist monk Bashō.

No matter how real it tries to be, all travel writing has a tendency to stress the metaphorical, simply because it has to appeal to an audience of readers who aren't there with you - who can't see what you're seeing, and therefore have to interpret your descriptions in their own terms.

Terms like "realistic" or "symbolic" therefore have to applied quite carefully to all forms of travel writing, but particularly traditional, ostensibly "straightforward" writing.

Explorers' accounts of their journeys are no exception. They generally begin with a travel journal (the necessary proof that you actually went where you claim to have gone - demanded by funding organisations and publishers alike). But even before that, they begin with a general sense of the genre and its requirements. In expedition accounts, for example, it's traditional not to allow room for any personal conflicts (hence the controversy over various recent books about Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition which do re-admit the material censored at the time by - among others - the explorer's widow).

Late-nineteenth-century / early twentieth-century Antarctic expedition narratives generally appeared in two forms. First, a full acount in two (or more) huge volumes - complete with extensive technical details about supplies, equipment, and scientific observations in a series of appendices. Second, a "popular" edition in one volume, with much (though not all) of that material edited out. Our extracts from Mawson come from just such a "popular" edition of his original two-volume work.

But I've also included some pages from a contemporary transcript of his original sledging diaries (you can find more details about these here). I think you'll agree that the two texts make a very different impression. Which one brings us closer to the "real" journey, I wonder?

In the recent television documentary Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica (2008), modern explorer Tim Jarvis attempted to reproduce Mawson's original death-march - with mixed results. Like Mawson, he survived. Unlike Mawson, he proved unable to extricate himself from a crevasse towards the end of the trip.

"In the footsteps of" is one obvious way of coming closer to an intangible, unreachable original journey. As well as being a good writing solution to the problem of recreating it for the reader.

Another approach is found in Theodora Kroeber's biography Ishi. Perhaps the msot interesting aspect of this book is its attempt to recreate the stone-age California which co-existed with the modern American state until (at least) the early twentieth century. Ishi was (so far as is known) the last Native American to live in complete ignorance of and isolation from the "civilised world" - but the extraordinary thing is that he and his tribe managed to stay under the radar for so long. What did the world look like through their eyes? Kroeber's anthropologist husband tried to find out the answer, whilst simultaneously attempting to watch over and mediate Ishi's integration into his new world.

Whether he succeeded or not is a very controversial subject - as is his widow's rather hagiographic account of his work - but it isn't hard to see how this idea of seeing one's own world through other people's eyes is an attractive one. How does it feel to live on the North Shore of Auckland when you don't speak English, for instance? Easy or hard? Confined or free? We can speculate, or (even better) we can try asking those who know.

Bashō's journey is, on the surface at least, more straightforward than these others. It's a travel diary, the record of a religious pilgrimage, and is presented as such. The discussion in Donald Keene's Travelers of a Hundred Ages (1989), though, reveals that many of the details in the diary are, in fact, fictional. Precise weather records exist from this period, for instance, and they reveal that Bashō will choose weather which he considers appropriate to particular sites and days, rather than adhering strictly to reality. It's also a very carefully worked-over text: one which he wrote and rewrote until the end of his life.

The journey, then, is a metaphor. Or rather, our generalising imaginations have a tendency to turn it into one. Kroeber and Mawson, as historian and scientist (respectively), have very high expectations of veracity to live up to on the part of their audience. Bashō, as a haiku poet, might have somewhat more licence extended to him, but I think it comes as a surprise that the intensely everyday and circumstantial details of his itinerary have undergone any alteration - let alone been extensively revised.

In all three cases, though, the texts we read enshrine particular interpretations of a journey. That's what travel literature is, in fact: not what happened to you on your trip, but how you chose to turn what happened to you into writing.

Discussion points:

Kroeber’s book describes a hidden world surviving behind the façade of the one we’re living in
Mawson’s text show the effects of writing up a narrative. His original journal notes are supplemented by the travel book he published a year or so later
Bashō's Narrow Road begins by pointing out that life is a journey not only for every human being, but even for "Days, months, years" and "the cloud-moving wind"

•

[A. L. Kroeber with Ishi]

Workshop 6:
In the footsteps of …

[dual session: Thurs 1-3 pm / Fri 11-1 pm]

“Take only memories, leave only footprints.”
– Chief Seattle.

Discussion:

Local Travel Assignment requirements

Sharing your scenes from last week.

Book Review due in today.

[Sir Douglas Mawson]

Lecture / Workshop 5

2009-05-18T07:24:00.010+12:00

[Robin Hyde in China (1938)]

Lecture 5:
Where?
Further Afield

Anthology texts to read:

Robin Hyde: from Dragon Rampant (1939)

•

The session today will be taught by Dr Mary Paul.

•

[Iris Guiver Wilkinson
[Robin Hyde] (1906-1939)]

Workshop 5:
Choosing the ideal destination

[plenary session]

“... nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary; wherein I doubted some authors less consulted truth than their own vanity, or interest, or the diversion of ignorant readers.”
– Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726): 161-62.

Exercise: Writing a Scene.

In pairs, you'll act out a little travel drama (if you have time, it would be great if you could swap around and do more than one scene).

Here are some suggested scenarios:

Couple quarreling in front of you about something trivial
Irritating teenagers behind you talking loudly about parties / boy or girlfriends / the uncoolness of their parents
Person trying to strike up acquaintance with attractive non-English-speaking tourist
Come up with something else ...

If we have time, we'll go round the class and listen to as many as possible of the scenes.

The important thing, though, is to take some ideas and notes home with you which can be elaborated into a short piece of writing to be workshopped in class next week.

[Robin Hyde in Auckland]

Lecture / Workshop 4

2009-05-17T08:20:00.018+12:00

[Stephen Jones: Death of the Neighborhood (2009)]

Lecture 4:
Where?
Close to Home

Anthology texts to read:

Steve Braunias: 'Father’s Day' (2006)
James Hamilton-Paterson: 'The End of Travel,' from Granta (2006)

•

Your Close Reading tests should be ready to return to you today. I'll also come prepared to answer any questions you have about the Book Review assignment. For the moment, though, make sure you've selected a text from the list here and (preferably) have it read before next week.

- Jack Ross

•

[Steve Braunias (b.1960)]

Workshop 4:
Sticking to your own backyard

[plenary session]

“Noël Coward told a reporter that he avoided reading up on New Zealand before arriving in the country. ‘Descriptions and even photographs create impressions which are far from the reality. I have found it best to do one’s study after, and not before'.”
– Lydia Monin, From the Writer’s Notebook (2006): 10.

Discussion of Book Review assignment.

Memorable book reviews you've encountered (including Chris Else’s of Biografi?)
What are their distinguishing features?

Self-characterisation Exercise

Divide into pairs. Each of you should write down three adjectives about yourself, then write down three guesses about your partner.
Confer together; discuss the image of yourself you might wish to portray in your writing; settle on a summing-up statement about each of you.

The important thing about a travel persona is that it should incorporate some flaws. Perfect people are boring to read about.

[James Hamilton-Paterson fan (2007)]

Lecture / Workshop 3

2009-05-16T08:25:00.016+12:00

[Kathy Goes to Haiti]

Lecture 3:
Who?
The Unreliable Subject

Anthology texts to read:

Kathy Acker: from Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978)
Bill Bryson: from The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America (1989)
Chris Else: 'The Curious Case of Biografi' (1995)
Lloyd Jones: from Biografi: An Albanian Quest (1993)

•

How Far Can You Go?

Last week we talked about ethnographers and "scientific" observers, who have the coherent and (relatively) straightforward project of reporting what they see in order to increase the sum of human knowledge.

This week we move on to a far more ambiguous and subjective group of observers: travel writers - the "unreliable subject" abroad.

Kathy Acker's Kathy Goes to Haiti is - ostensibly - presented as a novel. Nevertheless, the heroine shares the author's first name, and parts of the book, at least, present a set of travel experiences. This is no typical tourist travelogue, however. Passages of more or less straight description alternate with rather futile conversations and even sexual encounters. Is this, then, more "truthful" than a more conventional account of this exotic locale, or less?

The question of how far one can go and still remain a "travel writer" is asked even more comprehensively by Lloyd Jones' Biografi. Or, rather, by Chris Else's very perceptive Landfall review of the controversy over the book. Is it permissible to invent both of the main characters in your narrative and still remain in the non-fiction section of the bookshop? Readers and reviewers were - and are - divided on the issue, but I'm sure you can see the crucial importance of it for what we're trying to do in this course as a whole.

Else uses an important term in his review. He talks of the writer's responsibility to "a reality independent of their personal experience" (Anthology, p.382). He then goes on to introduce the notion of authority without really naming it directly:

I spent two years in the Seventies teaching English as a second language at the university there [in Albania]. (p.383)

That, it seems to me, is the vital distinction which enables him to criticise Jones's book so cogently. He was there. He knows - better, it is implied, than Jones's comparatively slight experience of the country could possibly know. "A book like Biografi," he concludes, "no matter how powerful a picture it presents, does not add muc to what we already know." (p.384)

Another interesting insight on the subject of representation / exploitation is given in Giovanni Tiso's recent piece Haiti in 3D, which compares the media coverage of the recent Haiti earthquake to the naive neo-colonialist atttitudes on display in James Cameron's blockbuster picture Avatar.

•

[Lloyd Jones: Biografi (1993)]

Workshop 3:
In-Class Test

[plenary session]

“Travel writing … is generically elusive, as unwilling to give up its claims to documentary veracity as it is to waive its licence to rhetorical excess.”
– Holland & Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters (1998): 12.

Close Reading
Test (closed book)
Worth: 10%
Duration: One hour
Requirements: a pen & some paper

You will be given a short piece of travel writing, extracted from the anthology, and asked to write an analysis of it.

What (in your opinion) is the overall intention of the piece? How can you tell?

What material does the author focus on? Why do you think this is so?

How does the author portray him/herself?

How effectively does the author achieve his/her intentions?

Give clear quotes or examples to justify your reading.

[Lloyd Jones: Biografi: A Traveller's Tale (2008)]

Lecture / Workshop 2

2009-05-15T09:34:00.015+12:00

[Charles Darwin: Journal of Researches (1839)]

Lecture 2:
Who?
Ethnographer

Anthology texts to read:

Charles Darwin: from Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary (1831-36)
Charles Darwin: from Journal of Researches (1839)
Alan Moorehead: from Darwin and the Beagle (1969)
Mary Louise Pratt: ‘Fieldwork in Common Places’ (1986)

•

There are two basic models for the traveller:

The Scientist

Biologist, geologist, anthropologist. Basically, you go to a far-off (or nearby) place to do fieldwork - to observe, record, and finally write up and analyse your observations. In the case of the human sciences, this is the role of the ethnographer.

The Writer

This is a far more eclectic and unpredictable personage. Some writers are very well informed about the places they visit, others make a point out of emphasising just how little they know, thus stressing the freshness of their perceptions and insights. The bottom line here, though, is that if the end result isn't entertaining or interesting, the enterprise has failed.

The most important thing to remember is this: both characters have a lot of the tourist in them, too. If you go to a place you don't already know well, then it goes without saying that your attitude to it will not be quite that of a native. There's a lot they know which they can't (or won't) communicate to you, but there's always the chance that you'll see things they don't because you have a wider scale of comparisons to apply.

Don't be ashamed of being a tourist, then - just try to minimise tourist vices such as superficiality, complacency and resentment of the unfamiliar.

Travel writing is now seen as a distinct genre, but it's instructive to realise just how recent a development this is. In the nineteenth century, a traveller such as Charles Darwin, hired as ship's naturalist on the surveying ship H. M. S. Beagle, was unaware of any such distinctions.

It was expected that he should keep notes on what he saw and collected, which would eventually form part of the official record of the voyage, but precisely what form this took was largely up to him. There were few precedents for what to include and what to leave out.

Darwin's Journal of Researches is a classic adventure story in its own right, but also because the discoveries he made then would eventually lead to the Origin of Species (1859) and the theory of evolution.

It's worth noting that, though, that while Darwin's Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. 'Beagle' was included as the third volume of the official account of the voyage, edited by Captain FitzRoy and published in 1839, his specifically scientific results were issued as The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. 'Beagle', in 5 vols (1839-43); and The Geology of the Voyage of the 'Beagle', in 3 parts (1842, 1844, and 1846).

Darwin's Journal was an popular success, and was therefore reissued separately from the rest of Captain Fitzroy's account. Darwin subsequently revised and expanded it (slightly) for the second edition in 1845, the one we still read today as The Voyage of the Beagle.

Perhaps the clearest analogy is with Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle (1927), which states that it is impossible to know both the exact position and the exact velocity of an object at the same time.

This is not only a statement about the limitations of a researcher's ability to measure particular quantities of a system, following the tenets of logical positivism, it is a statement about the nature of the system itself. [Wikipedia]

In other words, by observing something, you alter its nature. The allegedly objective eye of the committed ethnographer cannot enter a cultural situation without significantly altering it. It is therefore not simply desirable, but necessary to admit some amount of subjectivity in the nature of one's observations of other cultures.

The relationship between observer and observed is a complex one, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be observed, and no distinctions to be made between the various ways in which you can choose to report your discoveries ...

•

[Hill Country, Thailand (2002)]

Workshop 2:
Reasons for Travel

[plenary session]

“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality,
and instead of thinking how things may be,
to see them as they are.”
– Samuel Johnson

Discussion of requirements for Close Reading Test.

Practice: Close Reading exercise.

How would you like to portray yourself?
Reasons for foregrounding the personality of the traveller

[Charles Darwin (1809-1882)]

Lecture / Workshop 1

2009-05-14T08:50:00.011+12:00

[Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989)]

Lecture 1:
Who? Where? How? What? Why?

Anthology texts to read:

Bruce Chatwin: from In Patagonia (1977)
Alberto Manguel: from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1981)
Peter Wells: 'Grin like a Dog,' from A Passion for Travel (1998)

•

coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt
– Horace, Epistles 1: 11, l.27

["those who cross the sea change skies, but not their souls"]

Travel broadens the mind. Or does it? Some would say that travel can have the opposite effect: narrowing the mind, confirming one's prejudices and presuppositions about other places and people.

What matters most, perhaps, is how you travel.

If you don't know who you are already, the mere fact of going elsewhere is unlikely to tell you. And there are some exceptionally crass - air-conditioned and hermetically-sealed - ways to travel.

The purpose of this course is to suggest some of the things you might like to look for when next you go travelling - and I would contend that that can take place as effectively within your own city or suburb as to some more exotic destination.

The trick is to work out what you in particular have to offer as a travel writer. What are your talents, your fields of expertise? The course readings will present you with a variety of successful (and less successful) approaches you can take inspiration from.

We'll therefore be beginning with some close analyses of other people's writing, but we'll then move on rapidly to invite you to apply the pointers you pick up from them.

Travel is fun, but it's also arduous - even dangerous sometimes. Sitting in a sunlit tropical bar sampling daiquiris may seem like the acme of happiness on a grim midwinter day with the rain pelting down, but it palls very quickly. Nor is it particularly interesting to read about.

So travel writing may seem like a pretty amorphous, come-one, come-all genre, but you still have to face that basic task of conveying something fascinating about where you're sitting to readers who may or may not ever be there themselves.

•

[Alberto Manguel & Gianni Guadalupi:
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1981 / 1999)]

Workshop 1:
Where have you been?

[plenary session]

“One of the minimum requirements of the travel writer
is that he or she be a good listener.”
– Holland & Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters (1998): 13.

Discussion of the course structure, assessment & nature of the assignments.

How we’ll be conducting the workshops – discussion of the prescribed texts and (in some cases) doing in-class writing exercises as a preparation for the assignments.

What places have you visited – or lived in?
What records do you keep of your trip(s) / residence(s)?
What would you, personally, be interested in writing about?

[Peter Wells: Long Loop Home (2006)]

Assignment 4: Final Project

2009-05-13T08:45:00.009+12:00

[Bergman at work]

Description: Take-home Assignment
Worth: 40%
Due: Friday, 10th June
Word-limit: 4,000 words

This should be a written text, in any of the genres or formats we’ve discussed during the semester (travel narrative / filmscript / radio script / fiction).

You may include visual or even audiovisual material with the assignment if you wish, but the assessment will concentrate on the vividness and focus of your writing.

The subject matter should be a journey, or description of a locality of some sort.

The place or places should be real and not fictional (though certain parts of your narrative may be fictionalised, if you wish).

You may travel in the footsteps of another author, or use your own firsthand material.

If you wish to use notes or diaries from a past trip, be prepared to revise and supplement them considerably in order to create a compelling narrative.

[Jules Verne at work]

Assignment 3: Local Travel Piece

2009-05-12T08:57:00.006+12:00

[Transit Remorse]

Worth: 25%
Due: Session 8
Word-limit: between 2,000 & 2,500 words

Take public transport: bus / train / ferry to another part of the Auckland region – write a piece about your discoveries there.

This should not be a simple itinerary of where you went and what you saw.

You must create a scene or scenes, with characters and detailed interactions.

Decide on the overall significance of the many little details you see. Choose which aspects of your trip to emphasise accordingly.

[Auckland Ferry Terminal]

Assignment 2: Book Review

2009-05-11T07:57:00.008+12:00

[Rare Travel Books]

Description: Take-home Assignment
Worth: 15%
Due: Session 6
Word-limit: between 1000 & 1500 words

Write a review of the complete text of one of the following books.

There is an extract from each included in the Course Anthology, but you will (of course) be expected to give full consideration to the rest of the book as well:

Kathy Acker. Kathy Goes to Haiti (1989)
W. H. Auden & Louis MacNeice. Letters from Iceland (1937)
Bill Bryson. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America (1989)
Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities (1972)
Bruce Chatwin. In Patagonia (1977)
Anton Chekhov. The Island of Sakhalin (1895)
Martin Edmond. Luca Antara: Passages in Search of Australia (2006)
James Fenton. All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of Asia (1988)
Colin Hogg. Angel Gear: On the Road with Sam Hunt (1989)
Robin Hyde. Dragon Rampant (1939)
Theodora Kroeber. Ishi in Two Worlds (1961)
Douglas Mawson. Antarctic Diaries (1911-14)
Douglas Mawson. The Home of the Blizzard (1915)
Eric Newby. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958)
Iain Sinclair. London Orbital (2002)
Paul Theroux. The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992)
Tina Shaw, ed. A Passion for Travel (1998)

What, as you see it, is the author’s overall intention in his/her work?

How effectively does he/she achieve it?

Give clear quotations or examples to justify your reading.

[Norman Rockwell: Art Critic (1955)]

Assignment 1: Close Reading

2009-05-10T08:24:00.010+12:00

[The Scholar]

Description: In-class Test
Worth: 10%
Sat: Session 3
Duration: One hour
Requirements: a pen & some paper

You will be given a short piece of travel writing, extracted from the Course Anthology, and asked to write an analysis of it.

What (in your opinion) is the overall intention of the piece? How can you tell?

What material does the author focus on? Why do you think this is so?

How does the author portray him/herself?

How effectively does the author achieve his/her intentions?

Give clear quotes or examples to justify your reading.

[Turing Test]

Assignments

2009-05-09T08:57:00.016+12:00

[Collaboration]

Assessment:

This is a 15 point paper, 100 percent internally assessed. This is how the marks are divided up:

Title: Close Reading
Description: In-class Test
Worth: 10%
Sat: Session 3
Duration: One hour
Requirements: a pen & some paper

You will be given a short piece of travel writing, extracted from the Course Anthology, and asked to write an analysis of it.

Title: Book review
Description: Take-home Assignment
Worth: 15%
Due in: Session 6

Write a review of the complete text of one of these books (included as extracts in the Course Anthology).

Title: Local travel piece
Description: Take-home Assignment
Worth: 25%
Due in: Session 8

Take public transport: bus / train / ferry to another part of the Auckland region – write a piece about your discoveries there.

Title: Final project
Description: Take-home Assignment
Worth: 40%
Due in: Friday, 10th June

This should be a written text, in any of the genres or formats we’ve discussed during the semester (travel narrative / filmscript / radio script / fiction.

Description: Attendance / Participation
Worth: 10%

This grade will be based on how constructively and consistently you take part in class discussion and activities (which necessarily requires being familiar with the readings for each session).

NB: There will be a lot of demands made on your organizational abilities in this course. Think ahead, and always come prepared.

= 100 %

[Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870)]

Bibliography

2009-05-08T08:25:00.022+12:00

[Laurie Gough: The Open Road]

Course Anthology

Categories:

Primary Texts
Suggested Further Reading

[Sacramento Waterfront (1869)]

Primary Texts

Acker, Kathy. Kathy Goes to Haiti. 1989. London: Pandora, 1990. 5-32.

Auden, W. H. & Louis MacNeice. Letters from Iceland. London: Faber, 1937. 25-30 & 60-65.

Bashō, Matsuo. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Other Travel Sketches. Trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. 97-107 & 140-43.

Braunias, Steve. ‘Father’s Day.’ Sunday: The Sunday Star-Times Magazine (28 January, 2007): 50.

Bryson, Bill. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America. 1989. London: Secker & Warburg, 1993. 3-12.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. 1972. Trans William Weaver. 1974. London: Picador, 1979. 10-13, 20-21, 106-09 & 126-27.

Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia. 1977. London: Vintage, 1998. 1-9.

Chekhov, Anton. The Island of Sakhalin. 1895. Trans. Luba & Michael Terpak. 1967. London: The Folio Society, 1989. 10-20 & 48-52.

Conrad, Joseph. Youth: A Narrative; Heart of Darkness; The End of the Tether. 1902. Ed. A. J. Hoppé. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, 1967. 60-77.

Conrad, Joseph. Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces. Ed. Zdzislaw Najder. New York: Doubleday, 1978. 7-16.

Darwin, Charles. Journal of Researches. 1845. London: Routledge, 1891. 303-13.

Darwin, Charles. Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary. Ed. Richard Darwin Keynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 380-95.

Edmond, Martin. Luca Antara: Passages in Search of Australia. Adelaide, South Australia: East Street Publications, 2006. 195-215.

Else, Chris. 'Fact or Fiction: The Curious Case of Biografi.' Landfall 189 (1995): 58-65.

Fenton, James. All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of Asia. 1988. London: Penguin, 1990. xi-xv & 145-75

Hamilton, Scott. ‘From Kalmykia to Huntly.’ In Reading the Maps (2006).

Hamilton-Paterson, James. ‘The End of Travel.’ Granta 94: On the Road Again – Where Travel Writing Went Next (Summer, 2006): 221-34.

Hogg, Colin. Angel Gear: On the Road with Sam Hunt. Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1989. 89-102.

Hyde, Robin. Dragon Rampant. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939. 20-33 & 305-18

Jones, Lloyd. Biografi: An Albanian Quest. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1993. 1-13.

Kroeber, Theodora. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961. 3-23.

Lonely Planet New Zealand. 1977. Ed. Carolyn Bain, George Dunford, Korina Miller, Sally O’Brien & Charles Rawlings-Way. Footscray, Victoria: Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd, 2006. 20-30 & 101-5.

Manguel, Alberto & Gianni Guadalupi. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. London: Granada, 1981. 113-16.

Mawson, Douglas. Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries. Ed. Fred Jacka & Eleanor Jacka. 1988. North Sydney: Susan Haynes / Allen & Unwin, 1991. 127-29, 147-48, 150-51, 157-59, 170-72 & 174.

Mawson, Douglas. The Home of the Blizzard: The Story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914. 1915. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1996. 158-203.

Moorehead, Alan. Darwin and the Beagle. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. 176-77 & 180-82.

Newby, Eric. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. 1958. London: Picador, 1997. 1-17 & 280-84.

Polo, Marco. The Travels. Trans. Ronald Latham. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958. 38-45.

Pratt, Mary Louise. ‘Fieldwork in Common Places.’ In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford & George E. Marcus. Berkeley; University of California Press, 1986. 27-50.

Sacco, Joe. Safe Area Goražde. 2000. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2005. 1-7 & 50-56.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World. London: Allen Lane, 2001. 224-39 & 249-52.

Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital. London: Granta Books, 2002. 214-23.

Theroux, Paul. The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. 1992. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993. 17-24, 234-38 & 424-34.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. 1971. London: Paladin, 1972. 11-29.

Van Bohemen, Catherine. ‘Safari.’ In A Passion for Travel: New Zealand Writers and their Adventures Overseas. Ed. Tina Shaw. Auckland: Tandem Press, 1998. 85-100.

Wells, Peter. ‘Grin like a Dog.’ In A Passion for Travel: New Zealand Writers and their Adventures Overseas. Ed. Tina Shaw. Auckland: Tandem Press, 1998. 101-12.

[Nuh Sarche: The Traveller]

Suggested Further Reading

Botton, Alain de. The Art of Travel. 2002. London: Vintage, 2004.

Dodd, Philip, ed. The Art of Travel: Essays on travel writing. Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1982.

Duncan, James & Derek Gregory. Writes of Passage: Reading travel writing. London: Routledge, 1999.

Frawley, Maria H. A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994.

Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Glage, Liselotte, ed. Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation. Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000.

Guthrie-Smith, William. Tutira; The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station. Wellington, Reed, 1969.

Holland, Patrick & Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Hooper, Glenn, Tim Youngs, ed. Perspectives on travel writing. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2004.

Hulme, Peter, & Tim Youngs. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge & New York : Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern discourses of displacement. Durham, N.C : Duke University Press, 1996.

Keene, Donald. Travelers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed Through 1,000 Years of Diaries. 1989. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road: The Original Scroll. 1957. Ed. Howard Cunnell. Introductions by Howard Cunnell, Penny Vlagopoulos, George Mouratidis, Joshua Kupetz. 2007. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008.

Kowalewski, Michael, ed. Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the modern literature of travel. Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Monin, Lydia. From the Writer’s Notebook: Around New Zealand with 80 Authors. Auckland: Reed, 2006.

O’Neil, L. Peat. Travel Writing. Cincinnati, Ohio : Writer's Digest Books, 1996.

Porter, Dennis. Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Pratt, Mary-Louis. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London & New York: Routledge, 1992.

Rennie, Neil. Far-fetched Facts: The literature of travel and the idea of the South Seas. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1995.

Russell, Alison. Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern travel literature. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Strassberg, Richard E, ed & trans. Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China. Berkeley : Univ. of Calif. Press, 1994.

Taussig, Michael T. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Wevers, Lydia. Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand, 1809-1900. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002.

Wevers, Lydia, ed. Travelling to New Zealand: An Oxford Anthology. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2000.

[Martin Edmond (Bluff, 2006)]

Course Timetable

2009-05-07T08:50:00.034+12:00

[Travel Writing Tips]

2012

Lecture: Thursday 12-1 pm [AT5]
Workshop 1: Thursday 1-3 pm [AT5]
Workshop 2: Friday 11-1 pm [SC2]

[1/3] - Lecture / Workshop 1:
Who? Where? How? What? Why? [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
Bruce Chatwin. In Patagonia (1977)
Alberto Manguel. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1981)
Peter Wells. 'Grin like a Dog' (1998)

[workshop plenary session]

[8/3] - Lecture / Workshop 2:
Who? Ethnographer [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
Charles Darwin. Journal of Researches (1845)
Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (1839-42)
Alan Moorehead. Darwin and the Beagle (1969)
Mary Louise Pratt. ‘Fieldwork in Common Places’ (1986)

[workshop plenary session]

[15/3] - Lecture / Workshop 3:
Who? Unreliable Subject [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
Kathy Acker. Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978)
Bill Bryson. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America (1989)
Chris Else. ‘Fact or Fiction: the Curious Case of Biografi’ (1995)
Lloyd Jones. Biografi: An Albanian Quest (1993)

[workshop plenary session]

In-class test:
Close reading (10%)

[22/3] - Lecture / Workshop 4:
Where? Close to Home [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
Steve Braunias. 'Father’s Day' (2006)
James Hamilton-Paterson. 'The End of Travel' (2006)

[workshop plenary session]

[29/3] - Lecture / Workshop 5:
Where? Further Afield [Mary Paul]

Anthology texts to read:
Robin Hyde. Dragon Rampant (1939)

[workshop plenary session]

[5/4] - Lecture / Workshop 6:
How? Traditional Genres [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
Matsuo Bashō. Narrow Road to the Deep North (1694)
Theodora Kroeber. Ishi in Two Worlds (1961)
Douglas Mawson. The Antarctic Diaries (1911-14)
Douglas Mawson. The Home of the Blizzard (1915)

[dual workshop session]

Due in Thursday, 5th April:
Book review (15%)

[MID-SEMESTER BREAK]
(6-20/4/12)

[26/4] - Lecture / Workshop 7:
How? Hybrid Genres [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
W. H. Auden. Letters from Iceland (1937)
Martin Edmond. Luca Antara: Passages in Search of Australia (2006)
Colin Hogg. Angel Gear: On the Road with Sam Hunt (1989)

[dual workshop session]

[3/5] - Lecture / Workshop 8:
What? People [Jenny Lawn]

Anthology texts to read:
Anton Chekhov. The Island of Sakhalin (1895)
Paul Theroux. The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992)
Catherine van Bohemen. 'Safari '(1998)

[dual workshop session]

Due in Thursday, 3rd May:
Local travel piece (25%)

[10/5] - Lecture / Workshop 9:
What? Places & Events [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
James Fenton. 'The Narrow Road to the Solid North' (1988)
Joe Sacco. Safe Area Goražde (2000)
Eric Schlosser. Fast Food Nation (2001)

[dual workshop session]

[17/5] - Lecture / Workshop 10:
Why? Author Visit [tba]

Anthology texts to read:
Lonely Planet New Zealand (2006)
Eric Newby. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958)

[workshop plenary session]

[24/5] - Lecture / Workshop 11:
Why? Anti-travel [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
Scott Hamilton. 'From Kalmykia to Huntly' (2006)
Iain Sinclair. London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (2002)
Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

[dual workshop session]

[31/5] - Lecture / Workshop 12:
When? [Jack Ross]

Anthology texts to read:
Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities (1972)
Joseph Conrad. 'Heart of Darkness' (1899)
Joseph Conrad. 'Congo Diary' (1890)
Marco Polo. The Travels (c.1300)

[dual workshop session]

Due in Friday, 8th June:
Final project (40%)

[Shoshannah White & Tonee Harbert:
The Romance of Travel]

Course Requirements

2009-05-06T08:22:00.014+12:00

[Atlas]

Presentation

All the work you hand in should adhere to the following guidelines:
Typed: computer printouts, electric or manual typewriters are all acceptable; handwritten work is not.
1½ or double-spaced text.
Written on one side only of A4 sheets.
12 or 14-point type: smaller or larger is unacceptable.
Margins at least 2.5 cm (1 inch) all around (including top and bottom).
Submit assignments either in the Assignment slot on level 2 of the Atrium building, or directly to your lecturer during the workshop.

NB: Assignments may also be handed in through Stream.

Marking

You will be graded not on the quality of the experience or feelings you describe in your writing (whether poetry or prose), but on:
how well it meets the assignment requirements
how effective it is as a piece of writing.
the cogency with which you communicate the ideas that lie behind your work.
Presentation and grammar are also very important. Hastily thrown-together, sloppily formatted work is unlikely to achieve a good grade.

Grading of creative work can be particularly sensitive. If you disagree with a mark, I suggest that you wait for a few days before talking to us about it. Give yourself that much time to reread and reflect on the grade and the comments. If you still have a query or complaint after that, you should certainly get in touch with your marker.

Late Assignments

All work is due in workshops on the dates given in the Course Timetable.

Late work, without an extension, will incur a penalty of one mark per day.

If it is more than one week late, your marker may refuse to accept or grade it.

Extensions

If you want an extension, you must ask for one before the assignment is due. They will be given sparingly, in cases of bereavement, illness or family crisis. You will be asked to provide medical certificates for illness.

E-mail Communication

Under no circumstances will e-mailed electronic texts of assignments or exercises be printed out for you by the School.

Under no circumstances are you entitled to ask for address details for other students, either individually or as part of a group-list.

E-mail should be used only:

to request an extension on an assignment.
NB: This may or may not be granted. You are not guaranteed a favourable response.

to explain an absence from class.
NB: You must provide a medical certificate if it is health-related. If you fail to provide a satisfactory excuse, it will continue to be counted against you as an unexplained absence.

to establish the date of completion of an assignment.
NB: a hardcopy must always be handed in to the School as well.

Use of Laptop Computers in Class

No laptop may be used in any lecture, tutorial or workshop in this paper without the prior permission of the lecturer or tutor. That permission will be limited to cases of actual need (RSI problems or other physical disabilities).

Plagiarism

We take plagiarism extremely seriously. If you take all or part of someone else’s work without acknowledgement and present it as your own, you can expect to receive – at the very least – a zero grade for that assignment.

Depending on the seriousness of the offence, you may also face failure in the course as a whole.

If in doubt, ask. Not only your words, but also the plots and ideas you employ must be your own unaided work.

[Malinowski at Work]

Course Description

2009-05-05T12:49:00.009+12:00

[Steenie Harvey: The Travel Writer (2006)]

What is this course about?

In this paper you will study texts by prominent contemporary travel writers, paying special attention to literary and theoretical aspects of their work. You will then apply your critical understanding of the genre to the production of your own travel writing, based on experiences that you have had overseas or within New Zealand.

It is important to emphasise that this course covers both practical and theoretical aspects of Travel Writing. The emphasis throughout, however, will be on pragmatic ways of improving your own work within this field.

What are our learning objectives?

The paper aims to:

introduce you to a variety of travel books published in recent years;
introduce you to some of the literary issues and critical vocabulary germane to the interpretation of these texts;
introduce you to some of the ideological issues involved in the representation of other cultures and peoples;
encourage you to integrate your critical awareness of the genre of travel writing into your own creative practice;
enhance your creativity and skill as a writer working in this genre.

What am I expected to do each week?

You will attend one hour-long lecture and one two-hour workshop every week.

To prepare for the lecture, you must read the texts in the Course Anthology prescribed for that particular session (for further details, see the Course Timetable).

In the workshop there will be further discussion of these readings. You will also be expected to bring along any writing homework set for that week.

Attendance at both lectures and workshops is compulsory. A roll will be taken at each workshop. More than four unexplained absences will be taken as grounds for failure in the course.

What is good lecture etiquette?

All lectures and workshops begin at on the hour and continue till ten to the hour.
Please be punctual. If you arrive late, try to take a seat as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.
If you know you will have to leave early (for whatever reason), try to inform your lecturer of this in advance. Avoid disruption to other students by sitting at the end of a row. Try to close the door quietly as you go out.
If you are expecting an urgent phonecall and need to keep your cellphone on, you must clear this with your lecturer in advance. Otherwise, all cellphones should be turned off at all times. If you forget, and it rings by mistake, don't answer it.
Don't talk unless there's a class discussion underway. Make sure your remarks are addressed to the group as a whole, not your immediate neighbour.

What are the protocols of a writing workshop?

Be courteous and supportive of each other – constructively critical, not negative.
Be honest. Don’t give out praise or blame if you don’t really mean it.
Make no introductions to or apologies for the piece of work you are reading out. Let it speak for itself.
Don’t refuse to read your work out too often, or it will become an increasingly frightening prospect.

[Charles D. Laughlin: The Ethnographer (Uganda, 1969-70)]

Welcome

2008-04-14T09:06:00.024+12:00

[Basho, Narrow Road to the Deep North (1694)]

Welcome to 139.326: Travel Writing at Massey Albany.

This year, 2012, the course will be taught by Dr Jack Ross (course convenor) with guest sessions by Dr Mary Paul and Dr Jenny Lawn, together with further guest speakers to be announced.

I'd like to invite one (or more!) of you to become a student representative for the paper. You can now register for this online at www.asa.ac.nz/classreps. For further information, please contact your Student Advocacy Coordinator Penny Lyall.

So what exactly do we mean by the term "Travel Writing"? How liberal can our definition be? Here's what's up on the Massey University website:

Paper Number:

139.326

Paper Title:

Travel Writing

Credit Value:

15 credits

Calendar Prescription:

A study of travel writing, including critical and theoretical analysis and creative writing based on students’ own fieldwork.

Pre and co requisites:

Prerequisites: Any 200 level paper.
Corequisites: None

Semester:

Semester 1

Campus:

Auckland (Albany)

Mode:

Internal

E-Learning Category:

S (Stream-supported)

Paper coordinator:

Dr. Jack Ross
School of English and Media Studies
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Atrium Building Level L2.32
Albany Campus
Phone: 414 0800 x 9506
Email: j.r.ross@massey.ac.nz

Teaching Timetable (internal only):

The timetable for lectures, laboratories, and tutorials can be found at http://publictimetable.massey.ac.nz/

Learning Outcomes:

The paper aims to:
introduce you to a variety of travel books published in recent years;
introduce you to some of the literary issues and critical vocabulary germane to the interpretation of these texts;
introduce you to some of the ideological issues involved in the representation of other cultures and peoples;
encourage you to integrate your critical awareness of the genre of travel writing into your own creative practice;
enhance your creativity and skill as a writer working in this genre.

Major Topics:

In this paper you will first study texts by prominent contemporary travel writers, paying special attention to literary and aspects of their work. You will then apply your critical understanding of the genre to the production of your own travel writing, based on experiences that you have had overseas or within New Zealand.

Assessment Proportions:

Internal Assessment : 100%.

Description of Assessment Activities:

Title: Close Reading of a set text (in-class test)
Worth: 10%

Title: Critical commentary on one set text (take-home exercise)
Worth: 15%

Title: Creative Writing Exercise: Local Travel Piece
Worth: 25%

Title: Final Project
Worth: 40%

Title: Participation
Worth: 10%

Due Dates / Deadlines:

The due dates for assignments (and any other internal assessment components) will be advised at the start of the semester.

Penalties for late assignment submission:

None.

Assignment turnaround:

Three weeks.

Any specific requirements for passing the paper:

None.

Principal Textbook:

Departmental Book of Readings, available from Student Notes in the basement of Quad B.

[Morikawa Kyoriku: Portrait of Bashō (1693)]