Department of English

This course will investigate Travel Writing as a genre that combines fiction and non-fiction genres and moves between reporting truths and furthering myths. Students will move around Philadelphia and test the limits of their travel imagination as well as the boundaries of reality. They will read literary works of the 20th and 21st centuries alongside critical analyses and compare the formal and informal approaches of writing in order to create travelogues. They will explore different modes of writing each week – analysis of an essay one week and invention or variation on a travel theme the other. Students will practice the ‘staging of authenticity’.

The course will yield a collection of essays.

No midterms, no final exams. But active participation, enthusiastic discussion and generous criticism are requirements.