Module Catalogue 2025/26

Pre Requisite Comment

Also open to students of SELLL, HCA and GPS.

Co Requisite Comment

N/A

Aims

This module examines how cultures represent and make sense of one another through travel writing, a genre historically tied to pilgrimage, exploration, education and imperial expansion. Narratives about "faraway lands" played a critical role in constructing the unequal power dynamics that define our contemporary world, shaping perceptions of human and non-human otherness and justifying colonial rule as well as socio-environmental exploitation. Drawing on texts from French and Francophone contexts, the course explores travel writing’s role in reinforcing and, later, resisting these narratives. By situating travel writing within its historical and contemporary intellectual frameworks, students will critically analyse its evolving role in shaping global relations and cross-cultural understanding.

Module Aims:
Through seminars, lectures, and creative methods, this modules aims to develop students' understanding of how travel writing relates to contemporary global challenges by critically and creatively examining:
a)the links between travel, writing and power, and the construction of knowledges about foreign lands and cultures;
b)the construction of difference and travel writing's centrality in modes of othering and operations of sense around 'us' and 'them', 'here' and 'there', 'near' and 'far';
c)understandings of belonging and displacement, and travel writing as a source for understanding processes of rooting, uprooting, migration and settlement;
d)travel writing's role in the circulation of ideas about nature, environmental destruction and indigenous knowledges;
e)travel writers' accounts of technology in place-making in the 20th and 21st centuries, and its role in enabling and controlling mobility.

Further, the module aims to provide students with:

1. Interdisciplinary skills for combining critical thinking across literature, visual culture, social and environmental studies.
2. Opportunities for fieldwork and creative projects that bridge academic and practical skills.
3. Cultural and critical resources for engagement with pressing global challenges, such as migration, colonial histories, and environmental justice.
4. Opportunities, for students of language, to develop more advanced linguistic and analytical skills in French.

Outline Of Syllabus

This module examines how cultures represent, interpret, and relate to one another through the lens of French and Francophone travel writing. Historically, travel narratives played a central role in shaping the unequal power dynamics of 'the West and the rest', constructing "faraway lands" as exotic, exploitable, and subordinate to imperial powers. Early modern texts often framed cultural encounters through the figure of the "cannibal," a concept reflecting binaries between self and other while often legitimising colonial domination. In contrast, with contemporary theoretical frameworks, we can make the shift towards notions of "kin," thereby emphasising relationality, interconnection, and shared responsibilities across cultures and ecologies.

While acknowledging travel writing’s historical complicity in colonialism, this module adopts a dual approach by critically interrogating the genre's imperial legacies while exploring how modern and contemporary travel narratives challenge these frameworks. From the Brazilian jungle to the Arizona desert, the skyscrapers of New York to the seabed of the Atlantic, students will engage with texts spanning diverse genres, periods, and geographies. These works not only reflect intellectual debates about global politics, environmental justice, and identity but also offer insights into how travel narratives can sediment as well as unsettle normative worldviews.

In this module, therefore, students will uncover how travel writing reflects broader intellectual and cultural debates about global politics, environmental justice, and identity. This exploration will be enhanced via reflective practices, such as walk-based research, peer-to-peer discussions, photographic storytelling and/or journal writing, allowing students to connect their academic analysis to creative and ethnographic methods in assessments.

Through lectures, seminars, and practice-based activities, students will analyse how travel writing mediates encounters with other cultures, frames notions of belonging and displacement, and participates in shaping ethical and aesthetic understandings of the world. By situating travel writing at the intersection of literature, history, and cultural geography, this module equips students with interdisciplinary tools to critically evaluate the evolving role of travel narratives in fostering— or challenging — global inequalities. In doing so, it provides a rich, reflective, and engaging framework for understanding the significance of travel and travel writing in the constitution of contemporary worldviews.

Course Content:

The module begins by encouraging students to reflect critically on the concept of "travel" and to explore the genre-defying nature of travel writing. Emphasis is placed on the diversity and complexity of the form, alongside a discussion of ways to approach its multifaceted dimensions.

Subsequent weeks are structured around key themes. These include the intersections between travel writing and power, its engagement with nature and environmental concerns, and its role in constructing otherness. Additional topics examine how travel writing contributes to placemaking and memory, engages with postcolonial critiques, and interacts with other media forms such as fiction, film, and photography. Together, these sessions provide students with a comprehensive framework for understanding travel writing’s role in shaping cultural, social, and environmental narratives.

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

Students taking FRE4020 will work towards the following Knowledge Outcomes (KO) through lectures, seminar preparation and participation as well as the module's assessment activities.

By the module's close students will:

KO 1: Gain a critical awareness of the heterogeneity of the travel writing genre. They will have engaged with travel writing by male and female explorers, journalists, ethnographers, artists, novelists, cultural theorists and environmental activists.

KO2: Have developed a critical understanding of key theoretical concepts such as 'pilgrimage'; 'primitivism'; 'wonder'; 'otherness'; 'exotic'; 'psychogeography'; 'orientalism'; 'decolonialism', 'relation'; 'nature' and 'world'. Students will have engaged critically with issues related to travel and the formation and/or deconstruction of identity discourses and examined the various binaries — self/Other; real/fiction; exotic/ordinary; home/abroad; nature/civilisation — which travel writing enacts.

KO3: Have become experienced in formal analysis of travel writing in French through engagement with a range of genres, literary styles and media — autobiography, essay, cultural satire, poetry, photography and film.

KO4: Have encountered a range of critical perspectives on travel writing from across the fields of postcolonial studies, mobility studies, visual studies and literary criticism, anthropology, eco-feminism and global studies.

KO5: In the case of language students from SML, they will have enhanced their linguistic capacity in French through development of comprehension skills.

Intended Skill Outcomes

Students studying French will read core texts in the original language. For HASS students without reading proficiency in French, translations of core texts will be provided. For students within SML, the skills gained in FRE4020 build on those taught in previous years of the degree programme at the School of Modern Languages. For students from other schools, this module builds on the skills associated with training in the humanities - namely critical thinking, critical analysis, close reading, intercultural understanding, and subject-specific knowledges.
Specifically this module is designed to provide students the opportunity to practice and enhance the following skills:

IS1. Communication—Verbal
Students from will analyse, debate and present on a range of travel texts in seminar sessions, before structuring their ideas and arguments in formal assessments. Students from SML will read core texts in French, they will have demonstrated explicit knowledge of the language with relation to the structures, registers, and varieties of French and will apply linguistic principles required to analyse the language.
Students studying these texts in translation will develop similar communication skills, by drawing on literary analysis skills in English.

IS2. Interpersonal Skills
Students will be required to work together with classmates to achieve an understanding of theory and its application to core texts. In addition, while structuring and testing out their understanding of set reading through informal debate, seminar sessions will provide a space in which to reflect upon and develop their learning.

IS3. Learning To Learn\Self Development Skills
The formative assessment for this module is a 'travel journal', in which students record their impressions and insights into the set reading. This activity is designed to encourage a sense of progression and incremental improvement. Students will regularly be required to reflect on their modes of engagement with the texts/lectures and materials for the course.


IS4. Methodological skills: Students will learn to utilize multiple primary and secondary sources, and will consequently challenge and broaden their understanding of literary and textual-visual representation. In addition, they will learn how to take field notes and compile their findings through seminar activities.

IS5. Cognitive Skills
Analytical skills: Through close readings of primary materials and engagement with theories of travel writing, students will be encouraged to enrich their analytical frameworks. Through formative journal writing, students will be required to develop their responses and critical attention to texts and frame their own lines of questioning to be discussed in class.

IS6. Subject Specific Skills
Over the course of study, students will gain an understanding of key concepts relating to travel.
Students will develop further their literary analysis skills through engagement with issues of genre, and in particular with the tension between ethnographic and autobiographic forms of travel writing. In studying travel writing in French and Francophone contexts they will enhance their critical understanding of cultures and power relations beyond the Anglosphere, as well as engaging with a variety of critical contexts. Students from SML will also enhance their linguistic capabilities in French through readings in the target language.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

The Module’s primary corpus will meet all Knowledge Outcomes by enabling students to engage with travel writing that challenges generic categories and which emerges from a number of critical fields - including political philosophy, anthropology, cultural geography, environmental science and autobiography. Students will read extracts each week from one travel writer. Students studying French will read in the original language. Translations will be provided for those students from other schools within HASS.

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities:
1) Module talk to orient students and facilitate their awareness of the need for independent learning, self-reflection and to introduce them to the module themes and objectives. (KO1)
2) Lecture Materials: Lectures will model academic presentation for students, situate the significance of cultural materials, and provide critical and contextual information in order to support independent reading for the themed session. (KO1, KO2, KO6)
3) Weekly 2-hour seminars will provide students with opportunity to discuss their guided research and work with peers to develop their critical thinking and ideas. (KO1-7, IS1-6)
4) Fieldwork: Students will be guided in methods of dérive to explore the city centre of Newcastle. Working in small groups, they will choose a theme from the course and focus on this aspect as they walk through the city. As a group they will then reflect on this method, and design individual blogs based on their experience. This activity is designed to put into practice important conceptual tropes around travel and travel writing. (KO2, KO3, IS1, IS2, IS4)
5) Workshops: These will enable students to raise questions and gain skills in relation to essay planning and writing. (KO3, KO5, IS1–5)

Structured Research & Reading Activities:
Students read 1-2 article-length primary materials weekly. Accompanied by guided questions to facilitate student engagement and encourage close reading. Writing: To ensure reading is engaged, students have the option to write a formative 200-word response to set material. Either to answer guiding questions or link text from one week to a text from another. Student responses will submitted online via CANVAS in advance of scheduled small group session. Module Leader provides individual feedback and draws on responses to develop student discussion in small group scheduled sessions. (KO1-7, IS3-6)

Student-led Group Activity:
Students will work together in small groups to present their reflections and findings from fieldwork, which they will then shape into an individual assessed blog. (IS3, IS4, IS6) (KO1, KO2, LLO3, KO5, KO7)

Guided Independent Study: Students' independent learning will be encouraged through weekly writing tasks, and supported through open questions, a module workbook and bibliographical materials. Students will have the opportunity to share their out-of-class findings with the cohort each week and to integrate their independent research into their assessments. (IS1, IS3, IS4, IS5, IS6) (KO1-7)

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The assessed components of this module are designed to achieve the knowledge and skills outcomes.

The final set essay will test students' level in relation to all Knowledge Outcomes. This essay will be written in response to one of a number of open questions. In the essay workshop, students will be encouraged to appropriate a question and consider which primary sources they will use to address it. The essay will require students to undertake close analysis of the primary source, while framing this analysis in relation to one or more critical approaches and situating the text historically.

The reflective log is designed to support students in the pre-writing and research phase of the essay assignment. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks explored in weekly sessions, students will engage creatively with the city during the fieldwork activity and write a travel blog based on this practice.

Formative assessment is designed to support students' success in the summative assignments. The formative reflective log is designed to facilitate progression in the students' analytical capacity. It will require students to engage closely with a set text and to read the text in correspondence with the background provided by the lecture, and other primary sources. Feedback and class discussion will frame this exercise and therefore enhance students' capacity for engagement with feedback, while building confidence in linguistic comprehension, reading and writing skills.

General Notes

N/A