Paper #1 Assignment (see below for MWF/TR due dates)

Paper #1: Traveling to ECU

For your first paper, I want you to become part of the “conversation” of travel that we’ve read about in our first four essays.  However, I also want you to contribute your own travels and experiences in a way we can all appreciate.  To do this, I want you to write about your first experiences exploring ECU (or another college, if you have attended elsewhere), when you were still an “outsider” looking into a foreign culture.  Discuss what you saw before you understood the culture of classes, studying, dorms, clubs, games, Ada, etc., and how you learned to understand this strange new world.  Try to limit your paper to a few specific events so you can examine and discuss them in the same way as our other travel writers.

When writing, consider some of the themes each essay explores and relate it to your own experience becoming part of the ECU culture (even if you’re still learning it):

• Swick A Moving Experience: the importance of the “bad” travel experience; the loneliness and sadness of travel; the importance of being a “camera”
• Key, Fifty Shades of Greyhound: the idea of “Bus People”—how a specific space or environment can create a culture; how we acclimate to this culture even against our will
• 460 Days: how stereotypes cause resentment and misunderstanding; the implications of traveling to another culture for yourself and others; the importance of finding freedom even in prison
• Power, Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: exploring worlds that other people don’t know or care about; making your own path in the world, even when others consider it off-limits or undesirable
• Shoutmatoff, The Last of Eden: learning the value of marginalized people/cultures; seeing the world through another pair of eyes; the conflict of opposing cultures  

Besides telling your own travel story, I want you to respond to at least 2 of the essays we read for class (or another essay in the book we didn’t read): use these essays to support or expand your ideas.  Imagine that you’re at a round table discussion of travel, and you story is a response to the other authors sitting and speaking beside you.  How can their travels and ideas complement your own?  Or how might you respond or even disagree with theirs?  Remember, writing is always a conversation of ideas, so you can’t just write about yourself—you have to respond to the other writers/thinkers out there.  When you write about travel, you’re entering into an old and very vocal conversation. 

REQUIREMENTS

• 3-4 pages double spaced
• Use at least 2 essays from Best American Travel Writings 2014
• Quote and cite essays according to MLA format, along with a Works Cited page’
• For TR class: Due Tuesday, February 3rd by 5pm [in my office—no e-mails]
• For MWF class: Due Monday, February 2nd by 5pm [in my office—no emails]

Final Reading from BATW: The Last of Eden (pp.204-223)--sorry for the delay, it didn't post the first time!

Final Reading from The Best American Travel Writing 2014:

Shoumatoff, “The Last of Eden” (pp.204-223)

Part I: Definitions

gravitas (204)

indigenous (205)

proletariat (206)
genocide (207)

proliferating (211)

sedentary (212)

assimilating (213)

deranged (214)

demarcated (219)

insidiously (219)

BONUS: Who is Gauguin? (217)

Part II: Answer 2 of the 4 questions in a short paragraph 

1. Why is the Brazilian government reluctant to enforce the removal of the invasores from the traditional lands of the Awá and other tribes?  If they are indeed “invaders,” shouldn’t they be removed for the good of Brazil’s indigenous peoples?  Or do the needs of the many (Brazil) outweigh the needs of the few in this case?  Consider that there are only about 56 of the Awá tribe in existence. 

2. As Shoumatoff writes early in the essay, “All these communications and interactions are going on that our contingent from the modern world is dead to” (204).  In other words, the Awá see and communicate with a world that most of us scarcely even knew existed.  Based on this, how does looking at the world through the lens of Awá culture change how the author sees the world?  What common ideas/values change from their perspective?  Are these changes useful or valuable to us?  Or are they simply different or unique? 

3. When Shoumatoff asks his driver, a mixed-raced “caboclo” what tribe he is from, the driver curly replies, “I’m Brazilian” (218).  Why might this be a touchy subject for him?  In a culture full of diverse peoples and languages, why does race become such an important issue?  Indeed, why is race at the heart of the conflict between the isolados and the invasores? 

4. What should be done about the other isolados out in the rain forest, the tribes that have yet to be contracted or largely refuse contact?  Should they be contacted for their own good, to protect them?  Or should the Brazilian government and others simply let them alone and protect them from afar?  Are both options potentially dangerous to the tribes in question? 

Third Reading From BATW: Power, Excuse Us While We Kiss the Sky (144-157)

Third Reading from Best American Travel Writing 2014:

Power, “Excuse Us While We Kiss the Sky” (pp.144-157)

Part I: Definitions (again!)

derelict (145)

subversion (146)

paraphernalia (147)

clambering (150)

ethos (150)

pseudonymous (151)

ubiquitous (152)

aficionado (153)

clandestine (153)

sublime (155)

Part II: Questions, any 2 of the 4, in a short paragraph

1. What is the “ethos” of urbex?  Why do people risk life, limb, and law to pursue it?  How does the growth of this sport/exploration reflect the “tourist” mentality of modern life, particularly in major cities? 

2. How does the author experience a sense of the “sublime” while investigating the urbex subculture?  Where does he most experience this?  Would he be able to have this experience without being “clandestine”? 

3. At the end of the essay, Power writes that “People tend to age out of urbex, to get respectable and lose the spark of curiosity that called them to explore in the first place.  There are very few people who doe it after 40” (157).  How does this relate to some of our previous essays, which generally center on the travel experiences of young people (460 Days, Fifty Shades of Greyhound)?  What does youth have to do with urbex and/or exploring the world?

4. In the beginning of the essay Garrett is hauled off a plane and arrested for his involvement in various urbex activities (as are many of his friends).  Why do you think the British Police took his escapades so seriously, especially when he claims they are “non invasive” and even “wholesome”?  What is the risk of twenty-somethings running around London, Paris, and elsewhere pursuing the pleasures of urbex?  

READ FIRST: Differences between MWF and TR classes

Since I'm teaching both MWF and TR Composition II classes, the TR class is usually a day behind the MWF class.  That makes finding the right assignment a little tricky for each class.  Soon the TR class will catch up, but for now here are the instructions for each class:

MWF classes: read and respond to 460 Days for Wednesday's class (the questions are in the post below this one) 

TR classes: read and respond to A Moving Place and Fifty Shades of Greyhound for Tuesday's class.  This post is BELOW the post for 460 Days.  We'll read and discuss 460 Days for Thursday's class.  

Of course, TR classes can read and respond to all the essays, but remember that we're discussing A Moving Place/Fifty Shades of Greyhound first, and then moving to 460 Days on Thursday.  

In addition, here is the reading schedule for the next few weeks for anyone who wants to read ahead:

Lindhout/Corbett, 460 Days (84-105)

Power, Excuse Us While We Kiss The Sky (144-157)

Shoumatoff, The Last of Eden (204-223)         

Please let me know if you have any other questions!  See you next week...                        

Second Reading from BATW: Lindhout/Corbett, 460 Days

Second Reading from Best American Travel Writing:

Lindhout/Corbett, 460 Days (pp.84-105)

Part I: Define the following words (and include with your questions—not everyone did this!)

obscure (84)

logistics (85)

disdainfully (87)

speculative (88)

commodities (89)

boisterous (89)

inscrutable (89)

forlorn (91)

resonating (94)

emaciated (99)

* Also, what do you think the word “haram” means based on its use twice in the essay? 

Part II: Answer two of the following questions in a short paragraph, but again, no one-sentence responses.  None of these questions has a single, simple answer, as I hope our discussions in class will reveal. 

1. Why do you think the author was targeted as a potential victim in the Somalia?  Was it just because she was a foreigner?  Why might her abduction hint at some of the tensions of travel/tourism that Jamacia Kincaid wrote about in A Small Place (the handout we discussed in class)? 

2. What does being a prisoner for 460 days teach the author about Somali or Islamic culture?  How might the perspective of a prisoner be similar to what Swick wrote about in his essay, A Moving Experience, when he states, “it is only when something happens on our journey...that we are able to break through the surface of a place” (234)? 

3. Discuss the scene that takes place in the mosque between the author and the Somali woman.  Why does she take the author’s side, and how do her actions challenge our understanding of Islamic/Somali society?  Also, why do you think this moment made such an impression on the author? 

4. Even though the author’s attempt to escape failed, she writes that “the memory of the escape became a sustaining one...I craved it, just one hit of lung-clearing, odd-stacked-against-us, nearly impossible possibility...it was like bending a spoon with my mind” (105).  What do you think she means by this?  What was the importance of trying to escape even though it ultimately proved impossible?  What did she “find” through the botched attempt?  

First Reading/Questions from Best American Travel Writing 2014 (see below)

Close Reading Questions for Key’s “Fifty Shades of Greyhound” (pp.55-62) and Swick’s “A Moving Experience” (233-240)

PART ONE: Definitions (good reading is knowing what you read, so define these terms as you go—don’t just guess, actually look them up and make sure they fit into the essay)

Accosted (55)

Festooned (57)

Zenith (though it’s plural in the essay) (58)

Sanguine (59)

Ministrations (61)

Promiscuously (233)

Cliché mongers (234)—you might want to look up each word separately

Wistfulness (235)

Incongruous (238)

Valediction (239)

Answer TWO of the following with a brief response: at least a few sentences, enough to see you thinking and responding to the essays.  Avoid vague responses or restating the question; remember, these questions will not only help you respond in class, but will help you write the papers that follow.  You can post these responses as a comment below, OR you can bring a hard copy to class. 

1. How do both essays try to abolish the romanticism and illusions of travel and show us something more true or disappointing?  If this is “real” travel, what can we learn from it?  Can we still have a good experience if we’re having a bad time? 

2. Key says that when people learn you’re taking a Greyhound, you get “a look.  A look that remembers…as though speaking of an enchanted evening many moons ago filled with love and peyote and cries of distant coyotes” (62).  What does riding a Greyhound bus seem to represent for some people, and why might it be something to do, even though Key claims it’s a miserable experience? 

3. Why, according to Swick’s essay, is travel often called “the saddest pleasure” (235)?  What makes traveling such a sad, and often lonely, experience?  How might this go against the typical idea of travel sold to us by commercials and films? 

4. Swick quotes the writer Christopher Isherwood who claimed “I am a camera” (238).  Why should a traveler experience the world as a camera, and what would that mean?  Why do so many of us, who travel with cameras and cell phones (and take selfies!) still not see the world as a camera?  What are we missing?  

Welcome to the Spring Semester!

Welcome to the Course!  So what can you expect from Composition II, especially if you took Composition I with someone else?  

Well, Composition II is a ‘literary’ writing class, which means it focuses on a central theme to inspire our writings, discussions, and research.  For this class, we will discuss the theme of ‘travel and culture,’ since one of the best ways to examine the outside world is through writing.  Our first two books examine the process of travel: why do people travel, how do they interact with foreign cultures, and what do they learn about themselves—and humanity—in the process?  The last two books deal with metaphorical travels; that is, travels that take place more in the mind than in the world itself.  Though poetry and science fiction, we can explore hypothetical worlds and cultures that represent our own struggles and identities (without even having to leave the comfort of our own home).  

Ideally, this course will challenge the way you see the world and your ability to articulate your views through a variety of informal and critical writings.  I look forward to the many conversations and debates this class will undoubtedly inspire.  

Be sure to get the 4 books for class as soon as possible, since we'll start reading for Friday's class:

Required Texts (4):

• The Best American Travel Writing 2014, ed. Paul Theroux
• Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Songs from the Open Road, ed. American Poetry & Literacy Project  
• Boulle, Planet of the Apes 

See you in class!