4 semester hours
Participants on the Mendenhall Wetlands in Juneau, AK
Photo: Lindsey Smith
Professor Mary Quade
Travel writing has a long and impressive history. This course will help writers to know that history and become part of it.
310 Travel Writing 4 hours Mary Quade
Creative nonfiction addresses complex topics in all disciplines using both the lyricism of poetry and the narrative techniques of fiction. Unlike academic writing, its audience is the general reader, and that audience had grown immensely in the last decade, as evidenced by the popularity of such books as Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Travel writing, a sub-genre of creative nonfiction, uses the lens of exploration to examine subjects such as culture, politics, history, and the environment.
I. Course Description:
This course will review major trends in travel writing, with a focus on travel and the environment. The readings for the course will include contemporary examples of travel writing, which the students will use as models for their own work. Students will compose their own travel essays based on travel experiences. Their descriptions and stories may be heightened by irony, humor, cultural meditation, interviews, and research, and will push towards bringing insight to larger themes—ethical, political, and personal. Students will keep journals, produce their own examples of travel writing, and share their work with peer writers and faculty in workshops. Prerequisite: ENGL 206 or WRIT 221 or permission.
II. Goals and Objectives
Students will learn how to keep journals and recognize how effective journal development corresponds to the craft of creative writing.
The course will teach students the form and methodology for various types of travel writing
and develop an understanding of what constitutes good travel writing, especially travel writing that involves environmental issues. Students will write about their own personal experiences and encounters in the natural world as they travel in new environments.
The course presents environmental challenges and social dilemmas as addressed by historic and current authors. Students will formulate their own positions from research and readings on these subjects and incorporate their understanding into their work.
The course fulfills an elective requirement for a minor in Writing, as well as the requirement for addressing the ethical and historical aspects of science for Biology major. The course can be counted as one of the distribution requirements for general education.
The course stresses the importance of mentoring (peer and faculty) in the development of writing skills. By sharing works in progress the course encourages students to develop a sense of mutual regard in a community of writers at different stages of development in their own writing abilities. By requiring peer review, group discussion, and multiple revisions, the course demonstrates through practice the value of sharing responsibility for a product produced by individuals within a community of scholars.
III. Course Expectations
1. Texts:
Texts will be selected from contemporary anthologies such as The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Travel Writing as well as from current periodicals. Other texts will include historical examples of travel writing, such as Herman Melville’s The Encantadas, Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, or the writings of John James Audubon.
2. Required papers, projects and assignments:
Students will be required to turn in five works, each emphasizing a different aspect of Travel Writing (12% each). One of these pieces will need to involve natural history; another will need to look specifically at a scientific issue. Students will keep a journal throughout the course, which will be graded at the end (15%). Students will revise one of their pieces into a longer piece that involves thoughtful and complex discussion of an environmental issue (25%).
3. Expectations for attendance:
We expect students to attend all class sessions and field trips. If you must miss a class,
we expect you to show us the courtesy we will show you by calling us before hand to let us know why you must miss the session. Failure to do so may result in our handing you a less courteous grade than you might expect based on grades on your assignments.
4. Expectations for class participation and behavior:
We expect all students to participate in class discussions, readings, peer reviews, and dialogue. We also expect students to demonstrate the same courtesy to other students as they expect to receive when listening to new ideas, and critiquing new works.
5. Expectations for academic honesty:
We subscribe to the Hiram College policy on academic honesty as stated in the Academic Procedures section of your Hiram College Catalog. By turning in the first assignment to this course, you also acknowledge to us that you subscribe to this policy as well. We suggest you read the entire policy. Plagiarism is not acceptable. "An essay or term paper is designed to develop a student's own ability to think clearly and critically about a subject and to express ideas fluently …To avoid any suspicion of plagiarism, students should acknowledge any work not their own; in other words, any language, illustration, information, or diagram which is not original must be documented."
IV. Course Structure: Mary Quade will give an introduction to travel writing and the readings in the first weeks of the course. Throughout the course, students will keep journals and submit papers to Mary Quade with consultation by Denny Taylor. Workshops and faculty consultation will also run throughout the course. Students will begin revision work on the essay of their choice in the last three weeks of the course.
V. Assessment and Evaluation:
Writers have deadlines, and travel writers are no exception. Meeting deadlines is an important part of the writing process, for both the student and the faculty responding to the student’s work. While faculty reserve the right to grant deadline extensions in extraordinary circumstances, any other late work will be penalized. Work will be graded according to the guidelines presented on the Travel Writing rubric.
VI. Epilog
Although we have planned a direction for the course, student interest and concerns will focus the emphasis placed on each subject and the directions we explore. Our goal is to help each student to improve in producing works depicting the facets of travel writing most important to him or her. We encourage student participation at all times. We also ask students to keep an open mind to the comments and criticisms offered throughout the course. Some of the most effective plant growth comes from what appears to be the most severe forms of pruning—or as writers say, one must be willing to kill one’s darlings. Even if students do not agree with the assessment provided by peers and faculty, they will profit as a writer by following through with suggested changes, gaining the valuable lesson of experience by doing so. We’ll have much fun writing together.
Mary Quade
quademr at hiram.edu
last updated 7 February 2011
Banner Photo by Mathew J. Wilson