Lire, comprendre, écrire le voyage: méthodes d'analyses textuelles / Reading, understanding, and writing about travel: methods of textual analysis

This course will help social science and literature students learn to master analytical and textual methodologies that will allow them to read and comprehend a variety of texts in depth while at the same time developing their analytical writing skills by performing methodological exercises such as summaries, syntheses, technical explanations, close readings, argumentative dialectical essays, and thematic oral presentations. The common theme of these exercises will be the study of travel and of the “Other” in literature, anthropology, sociology, and politics. What representation and images of travel by the unfamiliar and the Other are created from the French reader’s perspective? And who is this Other? Etymologically “the one who is not here” can be the neighbour, the opposite sex, the foreigner – anyone who is different. And of what use are such diverse representations? In a quest for movement and change through different texts spanning the 16th to the 21st centuries, we shall explore the anthropological, sociological, political, stylistic, poetic, critical and ideological renewal of transcriptions of human identity and French perspectives. With this in mind, we shall study textual excerpts from various geographical, political, sociological, anthropological, and historical genres.

Texts: 1) a coursepack comprised of diverse argumentative texts

2) Le Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (Diderot)

3) La Théorie du Voyage (Michel Onfray)

4) Le Passeur (Le Clézio)

5) Le Roi de Kahel (Tierno Monénembo)