PCE 2011:
LITERATURE, MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES SIG
PRE-CONFERENCE EVENT
BRIGHTON 2011
TRAVEL IN LITERATURE AND TRAVEL LITERATURE
Travel has long been a direct and indirect topic for literature from before Homer’s Odyssey. One only needs to leaf through the English language canon from the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer to Donne’s A Valediction: forbidding mourning, from Fielding’s Tom Jones to Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi, to more recent classics like Kerouac’s On The Road and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to see what a fascinating door this PCE is opening for us.
But of course, we do not want to limit ourselves to ‘literature’, because there is a wide range of other high quality writing known as ‘travel literature’ to consider – just think of Gerald Durrell’s books about his journeys around the world in search of animals, the African writings of Laurens Van De Post, John Hillaby’s and Eric Newby’s walks, Michael Palin’s televised travels and D.H.Lawrence’s Etruscan and Mexican writings to name but a very few and very different examples of the genre.
And then there is song, and film…….
We are looking for one-hour talks and interactive workshops which examine some specific aspects of this very broad area. Possible threads to explore might be:
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one specific work of literature or piece of travel literature
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an overview of the travel writings of one particular author
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different authors writing on the same place
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different genres dealing with the same place
and always with some suggestions about how this might feed into the classroom.
If you have a specific offer or would like to kick some ideas around, please get in touch with the Coordinator by email as soon as possible.