World Literatures: Travel Writing
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this literature course on travel writing from Columbus's Diario to the present, organized around three regions: North America, Africa and the Atlantic world, and the polar Arctic and Antarctic. Readings include Olaudah Equiano, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, Louise Erdrich, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, alongside firsthand accounts of expeditions by Lewis and Clark, Henry Morton Stanley, and Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott. Materials extend beyond narrative texts to maps, objects, and archival records, including an Inuit film made for global audiences. The course traces how these accounts of curious tourists, expedition leaders, and stranded survivors did more than record encounters with place, examining how they helped integrate these regions into global economic, political, and knowledge systems. Free course materials are provided through MIT's OpenCourseWare platform, with no certificate offered.