GIAN Workshop on Travel Writing

A GIAN Workshop on Travel Writing: Texts, Theories and Analysis for Frameworks is being conducted by School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Management, IIT Bhubaneswar under the patronage of Prof. R.V. Rajakumar, Director IIT Bhubaneswar from 19 December to 29 December 2016.

Noted travel writing exponents Prof. Carl Thompson from St. Mary's University, UK and Prof. Jatindra Kumar Nayak, Utkal University, Odisha are the resource persons for the course. This course is aimed to give participants a thorough grounding in both the history of travel writing, and the diverse concerns and forms which currently characterize the genre. Attendees will be introduced to the key debates associated with the genre, and the principal methodologies and modes of scholarly analysis. Topics to be explored will include the processes of authentication by which travel writers secure their credibility with readers; the rhetorical strategies and legacies associated with imperialism, colonialism and Orientalism; travel writing and aesthetics (especially the picturesque); questions of gender and the travel writing’s function as an important technology of gender, for both men and women; travel writing as a form of memory work, and its role in the negotiation of personal trauma. The final lectures of the course will also feature a number of primary texts by modern Indian travel writers, and also travelogues by foreign visitors to India, thereby encouraging participants to reflect both on traditions of Indian cosmopolitanism and some of the new ‘imagined geographies’ being forged around the world in relation to India.