ENGL 4770

Transits of Empire: Early American and Native American Travel Writing

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

This course examines early American travel literature by and about Native Americans in a comparative perspective. Beginning with Columbus's Diario, we will move sweepingly through to the 1830s, viewing along the way the writing of a broad group of travelers including Lewis and Clark, and Edgar Allan Poe. As a body of literature, their work observes and imagines "new" lands and places as a way of constructing and, occasionally, questioning colonial knowledge about Native others. Crucially, we will also be reading texts written by Native American authors (Samson Occom, William Apess, George Copway, and Black Hawk, among others), whose physical and narrative movements in and among Native networks here and abroad challenged colonial powers through their assertions of longstanding geopolitics, kinship systems, and cosmologies.

When Offered Fall.

Breadth Requirement (GHB)
Distribution Category (LA-AS)

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