230626 Meeting the "Other": Travel and Adventure in British Literature (S) (SoSe 2007)

Most accounts of journeys, whether in travel writing or in fiction, display ambivalent processes of identity formation: encountering foreign spaces and people, and recognizing what is "other", travellers tend to rely on implied notions of their own identity, but at the same time, these notions themselves are shaped by the encounters with alterity. In this seminar, we will explore the ambivalences of cultural encounter and identity formation voiced or implied in imperial/colonial and post-colonial prose fiction that focuses on journeys and adventure (a term that is problematic in itself and will need to be discussed). We will also look at some examples of the travelogue, which will be made available in a reader at the beginning of the semester.

Please buy your own copies of the following texts (any edition):

Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines (1885)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India(1924)
Rose Tremain, The Colour (2003)