Travelers, Exiles & Tourists: The Search for Identity & Self in Literary & Filmic Expression

This multidisciplinary course explores the meaning of foreign travel, the search for identity and self-awareness through exile, and literary and filmic expressions of journey and coming of age through travel and cultural displacement. Taught abroad, you will analyze literary and visual texts, comparing them to your own experience and expressions of overseas travel. As a foreigner abroad, you will reflect upon the lives and complex meaning of travelers, exiles, foreigners and tourists. Using a theoretical and comparative approach to contemporary literary and filmic expressions of travelers, you reflect upon cultural difference, identity, and the role journey plays in cultural understanding, both of home and host peoples.

Organized around the theme of travel as search for identity and cultural understanding, the course begins by building a historical and conceptual framework from Homer to Woody Allen that situates travel writing within Western literary and cultural traditions. The course then addresses specific English and American travel writing, using contemporary literary and filmic representations of how travelers and foreigners develop distinct strategies for managing cultural conflict while struggling to experience and learn from the lives of foreign others. In class you will compare these strategies to those you adopt yourself while living and studying in the foreign city abroad.

Finally, you will compare and contrast your own experience and evolving image of contemporary Spain with the diverse images presented by travelers and exiles in their respective literary and visual texts. You will find inspiration in the eclectic texts of authors such as Cervantes, E.M Forster, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac as well as in contemporary films about adventurous travelers and tourists such as Darjeeling Express, Vicky, Cristina Barcelona, or Lost in Translation.

Throughout the course, you will reflect upon and write about your own travels, the challenges you encounter discovering Spanish society, the strategies you devise to overcome them, and the cultural identity and awareness you develop as a foreigner.