Visions, Travalogues and Utopias

The construction of self and others in European thought

Elemér Boreczky, PhD

236 Scott Hall, College Avenue

Office hours: MTh 13:00-14:00

e-mail: boreczky@rci.rutgers.edu

Tuesday/Thursday: 1:10-4:00 PM

We tend to think about other cultures as entities constructed along the the same lines of thought as our own. By means of cultural discourse analysis, this seminar opens windows into the working of the mind behind historical actors and explores some episodes in the development of thinking about other cultures and the place of the person in European intellectual tradition by the close reading of early and visionary forms of travel literature, utopias, topographical and literary works. It helps students to understand how early forms of thinking about self and others, the extrapolation and reflection of the private and communal concerns of the ’Christian Republic,’ as the geographical-cultural entity we know as Europe was called before the Europe of nation states emerged, the issues of the good, free and beautiful life, how to ’do-well, do-better and do-best,’ evolved into different visions, and awareness of distinct geographical, social, economic and cultural entities in the expanding world both imaginary and real. How, from the early forms of independent thinking of the authors of ’the republic of letters,’ the interplay between intellectuals and actors led to the development of lay intellectuals, political theory, the early idea of information society and literature. It gives examples of the construction of the public mind behind modern forms of thinking about society, government, the welfare of the people, the place of the individual and the place of the collective and individual soul in the constructed and (sometimes) constitutionalized forms of nation states: social justice and national sovereignity.

Readings include extracts from the Land of Cockaigne, the works of Sir John Mandeville, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, James Harrington, Richard Hakluyt, James Cook, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Sándor Bölöni Farkas, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster and Jack Kerouac.

Students will be expected to give presentations to contextualize the particular works, and write a takehome essay about the cultural issues revealed in one of the texts under scrutiny.

Attendence (20%), presentation (30%) and a pp. 5-6. take home essay (50%)

1.      Travelers and wayfarers: introduction. On the road: merchants, pilgrims, knights, vagabonds, outlaws, clerics.The social composition of the characters of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, compared to Langland’s Piers Ploughman.

2.      In search of the good life: visions as travelogues. The Voyage of Bran, Brendan’s voyage for ’The Land of Delight,’ and the genre of the immram. George Grassaphan’s travel to St Patrick’s purgatory, and the genre of visionary literature. William’s vision of Piers Ploughman.

3.      Columbus, The Travels of Marco Polo and  The Travels of Sir John Mandevill

4.      Amerigo Vespucci, Sir Thomas More and Erasmus: More’s Utopia. Identifying the issues for social visionaries.

5.      Mapping the mind, the land and the seas: the separation of fictious and real lands.  Gerardus Mercator, John Dee and the English navigators.

6.      Richard Hakluyt : Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation.

7.      William Shapespeare; the political and cultural context and the visions of the good life in The Tempest.

8.      James Harrington’s Oceana and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.

9.      Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as the script of modern civilization.

10.  James Cook’s travels and discoveries.

11.  Bölöni Farkas György and his Journey to America (1837).

12.  E.M. Forster’s Passage to India

13.  Distopia; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World                                                                                   

14.  Jack Kerouac’s On the Road