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Wish you were here: Workshopping Travel Writing (ENGL2507)
Semester 1 / 2008

Texts

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meaning!$!Raban, Jonathan!$! UK!$!Pan Macmillan!$!2000
y separately published work icon Tracks Robyn Davidson , London : Jonathan Cape , 1980 Z811575 1980 single work autobiography travel (taught in 8 units)

Robyn Davidson tells the story of her 1977 journey across the desert, from Alice Springs to Western Australia. She and a Pitjantjara elder completed their crossing on camel's back. Tracks is the story of her adventure, not only across the desert, but also into self-discovery, and the discovery of the beauty, nobility, and history of the country and its people. (Source: Trove)

y separately published work icon Stasiland Anna Funder , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2002 Z1001793 2002 single work non-fiction (taught in 5 units)
— Appears in: Reader's Digest Encounters : Real Life Reading 2006; (p. 9-174)

To write this non-fiction work about life in the former East Germany, Anna Funder interviewed former Stasi officers and the people they surveilled. Described in the National Library of Australia record as 'A book of travel, history and biography that reads like a documentary novel,' Stasiland takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to its material with an 'emphasis on a sympathetic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'. Paper delivered at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference 2006).

y separately published work icon Foreign Correspondence Geraldine Brooks , Sydney : Anchor , 1998 Z1182902 1998 single work autobiography (taught in 2 units)

From adolescent pen pal in the suburbs of Australia to prize-winning foreign correspondent, Geraldine Brooks presents an intimate and captivating memoir. Born on Bland Street in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid place where history happens and culture comes from. As a means of escaping the world around her, she enlists pen pals from around the globe who offer her a window on the hazards of adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. With the aid of her letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests, the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz.

Brooks goes from the protected environment of a Catholic girls school to the University of Sydney, eventually renting her own flat near the bustling Sydney harbor. She hires on as an intern at The Sydney Morning Herald and then wins a scholarship to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, where she begins her career as a foreign correspondent. As a writer for The Wall Street Journal, Brooks reports on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa, but she never forgets her earlier foreign correspondence.

Back in Australia to attend her dying father, she stumbles on her old letters in her parents' basement, and embarks on a journey that tales her around the world on the most meaningful assignment of her career. Her search leads her through Israeli moshavim, Arab souks, medieval French hill towns, Martha's Vineyard fishing shacks, and Manhattan nightclubs. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness.

It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeland and her own life clearly. Candid, thoughtful, and compelling, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world. (Publisher description)

Description

This Group B topic is designed as an elective for both BA and Bachelor of Cultural Tourism students and is offered every year. Travel writing is a flourishing genre in international publishing that draws on a number of discursive traditions: fiction, the diary and the journal, the picaresque, political journalism, philosophical meditations, environmental writing, food writing, autobiography, history, garden and horticulture writing, literary criticism, photography and ethnography. Such eclecticism is one of its strengths, allowing travel writing to range across many issues of concern in a globalising world: migration, transculturation, displacement, diaspora, authenticity, environmentalism, racism, nationalism, cultural conflict, centres and margins.

This topic is designed around a series of weekly two-hour workshops in which students will read and respond to their peers travel writing both on the page and through discussion, making editorial suggestions that will develop their skills as professional, thoughtful, sensitive and reflective writers. There will be an emphasis on travel and other kinds of creative writing undertaken by tourism professionals and on other modes and forms of professional writing.

Assessment

Essay; In-class activities and/or FLO activities;

One Substantial Piece of Polished Writing.

Other Details

Levels: Undergraduate
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