Courses
Focuses on travel writing and place-based writing. Examines the history, global cultural contexts, conventions of, and theories about the genres through reading exemplary texts and studying photographs and films. Offers students an opportunity to produce examples of travel writing and place-based writing as well as short videos and photo-collages.
Offers writing instruction for students interested in interdisciplinary study or who wish to explore multiple disciplines. Students practice and reflect on writing in professional, public, and academic genres relevant to their individual experiences and goals. In a workshop setting, offers students an opportunity to evaluate a wide variety of sources and to develop expertise in audience analysis, critical research, peer review, and revision.
In this program, students will engage with site-specific writing in both nature and urban settings through studying the walk (flâneur). Flâneur derives from the Old Norse verb flana, “to wander with no purpose”. However, we have a purpose: documentation of place, context, and self through travel in Japan. We will read Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior as a way to engage history and re-see the travelogue as an expressive form that allows the individual experience to provide environmental and cultural context. In Tokyo we will read writers who work with the walk as a literary form, such as Pierre Larousse, Charles Baudellaire, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Virginia Woolf, Janet Cardiff, Agnes Varda, and Ron Silliman. We will experience Japanese artists (Haruki Murakami, Hiroko Oyamada, Izumi Suzuki, Yu Miri, Mieko Kawakami, Hayao Miyazaki, Yasujiro Ozu, Hirokazo Kore-eda) and artworks as a form of site-specific experience while uncovering what it means to be “modern” in a country that values tradition. By the end of this Dialogue we will create multimodal travelogue writing projects about our experiences, journeys, and sites taking into account the contrast between the urbane ( Tokyo, Hiroshima) and the natural world (Nikko) in contemporary Japan.
