Let's Go

"Richard Misrach, Battleground Point #1 (1999)

What This Course Is All About

Americans are in love with driving, travel, and taking off to parts unknown, and journalists, essayists, novelists and filmmakers have all reflected our national obsession with getting on the road.

But the allure of travel, as seductive as it is, is also complicated by issues of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation in ways we don't often consider. In this course, we will examine travel narratives from various eras, novels and essays in which travel plays a role, and road movies, both old and recent, in an attempt to answer a series of questions: What are these various authors and creators trying to get us to believe about road trips? What are they trying to persuade us of? How do they use various rhetorical techniques to try to get their audiences to accept a particular vision of travel? In what ways do they play on our ideas about travel to get us to accept some larger idea or notion?

Readings include: short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louise Erdrich and Sam Shepard, travel essays by Alain de Boton and Rebecca Solnit, Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, accounts of travel abroad from various eras by a wide selection of authors, and the films Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise and Smoke Signals.