CYA (College Year in Athens): Online Summer Course - Becoming a Traveler-Writing on Greece

 This course will be offered on-line with synchronous and asynchronous sessions equivalent to 60 contact hours.

Greece has been a stimulus for travel writing since the time Homer charted Odysseus’ eventful journey home from Troy through the Greek archipelago, while nine centuries later, Pausanias’ Description of Greece became the world’s first guidebook. Down the centuries, both the shifting geographical area of Greece and its inhabitants have continued to inspire innovative travel texts of many different kinds, with renowned writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like Byron, Miller, Durrell, Storace and Leigh Fermor now joined by almost every celebrated travel writer of our own time as well as a generation of enthusiastic travel bloggers, fascinated by the insights (about self and others) which the land and its people still provide.

On this course, Greece will therefore act as a lens through which we study key genres of literary and investigative travel writing, including the personal essay, destination article, and virtual tour. Reading these texts not only as critics but also as writers (i.e. to see how they function from the inside out) will allow you to develop your own original travel stories, aided by the craft workshops and activities the course includes. Through travel texts on Greece and your own travel writing and (real or virtual) travel experiences, we will also explore the following questions: How can we write about ‘elsewhere’ without exoticizing or romanticizing new places and peoples? In what ways do our expectations and actual experiences of these places and peoples juxtapose, merge, or align? How might an outsider’s perspective contribute to an insightful representation of place? How can the mythology, history, and literary tradition of a place enrich this representation? And finally, how can travel, as the writer Pico Iyer claims, allow us (real or virtual) travelers to ‘find ourselves’?