120033 PS Literature: Introductory Seminar (304) (2009W)

"I'am a long way from my home"- wanderers, ramblers, gamblers, and hobos have frequently inhabited fictional worlds in US literature. This introductory seminar is designed to look at texts that negotiate being on the road (or on a freight train or raft down the Mississippi for that matter) as expressions of the continuous state of becoming and the fluidity of subject positions within and as constructions of America.We will look at the following texts (some in full, some in excerpts) which are all are taken from the North American context of the 19th and 20th century:
Thoreau's Walking, Mark Twain's Huck Finn, Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Carolyn Cassidy's Off the Road, Guthrie's Bound for Glory, Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues (in English translation)
Poetry and Lyrics by Whitman, Frost, Guthrie, Dylan.