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Seminar: 10-76-3-D1/WD1-09 Key Topics in Literature and Culture: Satires of Travel - Details

Seminar: 10-76-3-D1/WD1-09 Key Topics in Literature and Culture: Satires of Travel - Details

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General information

Course name Seminar: 10-76-3-D1/WD1-09 Key Topics in Literature and Culture: Satires of Travel
Subtitle
Course number 10-76-3-D1/WD1-09
Semester WiSe 2025/2026
Current number of participants 27
expected number of participants 35
Home institute Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Courses type Seminar in category Teaching
Next date Thursday, 18.12.2025 10:15 - 11:45, Room: GW2 A3390 (CIP-Labor FB 10)
Type/Form
Englischsprachige Veranstaltung Ja
Veranstaltung für ältere Erwachsene Yes

Module assignments

Comment/Description

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

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