Reading, Understanding, Writing Travel: Textual Analysis Methodologies

This course will help students master analytical and textual methodologies. These methodologies will allow students to read and comprehend texts in depth while developing their written analytical skills by performing methodological exercises such as summaries, technical explanations, close readings, argumentative dialectical essay, reading analyses or oral thematic presentations.
In these exercises, we will study tropes on the Other in literature, anthropology, sociology, and politics. What representation and images of travel, the foreign and the Other, stem from the French reader’s perspective? And who is this Other? Etymologically “the one who is not here”, the Other can be the neighbor, the opposite sex, the foreigner -- whoever is different. And what usage is made of such fluctuating representations? In a quest for travel and alterity through different texts spanning the 16th to the 21st centuries, we will explore the anthropological, sociological, political, stylistic, poetical, critical and ideological renewal of transcribed viewpoints of human identity and French clichés. To this end, we will study textual excerpts from different horizons might they be geographical, political, sociological, anthropological or historical.

Required texts:
- Denis DIDEROT, Le Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, ISBN: 2253138096
- Michel ONFRAY, La Théorie du Voyage, ISBN: 2253084417