Spring 2005 Advance Course Information

This information effective for Spring 2005. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

Pre- and Early Modern Studies

[LTPR-190P]

190P. Early Modern Travel Narratives

Instructor: C. Freccero

Course Description:

This course will focus on early modern travel narratives and colonial encounters—both real and imagined—between Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas and other parts of the world in the 15th and 16th centuries, or what is also known as the Renaissance. While many courses have as their focus the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the New World, and numerous studies focus on the English colonial ventures in North America, this course seeks primarily to explore documents of early modern New World encounters that do not fit neatly into the category of colonialism or conquest, with the goal of producing a more ideologically nuanced articulation of this moment in the history of western Europe.

Through a study of fictional and historical texts, the course aims to produce a genealogy of the western European "encounter" with the New World that does not foreclose the possibility of alternative futures by a retrospective reading that sees conquest and genocide as the exclusive outcomes of the encounter. In part, this will involve a psychoanalytic as well as historical approach to the texts in question, an approach that seeks to read the conflicting and contradictory—we might even say "queer"—desires and identifications mobilized within European accounts of encounters with human alterity.

Requirements:

1. You will "build" a research paper, from abstract (1-2 paragraphs) to prospectus (3-5 pages and then 5-7 pages), to presentation (10 minutes talk or 4 pages), to final essay form (15-20 pages). Students will read each other's work and provide feedback. These papers can be work you have already begun in another course or context, but they must bear a relation to the themes and topics of the course;
2. students will be required to take turns leading discussion on selected secondary materials;
3. attend class, do all the reading (by the date below which it appears) and come to class prepared to discuss it.

Weekly Schedule

Week 1. Backgrounds
Week 2. Marco Polo (guest: Professor Sharon Kinoshita)
Week 3. Pigafetta
Week 4. Las Casas
Week 5. Montaigne (Xerox)
Week 6. Lery
Week 7. Lery
Week 8. Cabeza de Vaca
Week 9. Shakespeare

Required:

• Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan's Voyage: A Narrative Account … (paper)
  Dover 0486280993
• The Travels of Marco Polo
  Penguin 0140440577
• Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whately
  UC Press 0520082745
• Bartolome de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
  Penguin 0140445625
• Shakespeare, The Tempest (Norton Critical Edition), ed. Peter Hulme, William Sherman
  0393978192
• Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters
  Routledge 0415011469
• Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions
  U of Chicago Press 0226306518

Recommended:

• The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs
  Cambridge UP 0521786525
• Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, eds., Cannibalism and the Colonial World
  Cambridge UP 052162908X
• Stephen Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters
  U of CA Press 0520080211

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