6. Midterm

Post by Thursday, Oct. 9, class time.  

Write 1500 words (not more—use the word count to check yourself). If you like, include a picture. (Please make sure there’s an extra space between paragraphs; you may need to go back and edit to insert the breaks.)

The goal of this exercise is to relate a social science discussion of travel and tourism to one or more of the novels we’ve read so far—Daisy Miller, The Sun Also Rises, The Sheltering Sky, and On the Road. The articles include the following:

1. Entry on “authenticity” in the Encyclopedia of Tourism

2. Erik Cohen, “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences”

3. Dean MacCannell, “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings”

4. Donald Redfoot, “Touristic Authenticity, Touristic Angst, and Modern Reality”

These articles develop several themes—the motivations for travel, the varieties of tourist and travel experience, the traveler-tourist’s search for authenticity, the traveler’s sense of alienation from his “center,” the idea of travel as a form of pilgrimage, etc. Focus on one such theme, work up a thesis about it, write about one or more of the novels, and incorporate a few ideas and quotations from the article(s). Narrow the scope of the paper to a single theme, question, or main point. Use specific examples from the novels: characters, episodes, images, passages.

Assume your reader has read the articles and novels, so don’t spend too much time summarizing, explaining, and quoting: use most of your space applying something in the article(s) to a reading of the novels. Keep quotations short and don’t over do them: this is a relatively short paper, and most of the words should be yours.  For quotations, just put the page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence (before the period), “like this” (70). There’s more on citation formats on the website, here.