ENGW3801W

This undergraduate creative writing class which satisfies both the LE and the Writing-Intensive requirements focuses on the experience and the literary evocation of travel, with students based first in the capital, Madrid, and then in Toledo, a medieval city in the center of Spain. In Madrid, students will write about the Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight on New Year's eve; they will compare the characteristics of two different plazas; they will write poetry about art in the Prado Museum. In Toledo, they will wander through tangled streets, shops, cathedrals, fortresses, synagogues and museums, taking notes for poems, stories, and essays as they go. Madrid is a vibrant, modern European center; Toledo, a beautifully preserved city on a hill, has been declared, in its entirety, a national monument. For centuries an historic, scholarly and artistic center, Toledo was long famed for its religious tolerance, with Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations coexisting within its walls.

In both locations, we will have guided tours of Spanish monuments and museums, and students will reflect on the experience of travel via many different types and styles of writing assignments: the daily post-card, the food review, the creative travel guide, the work of ekphrasis, the annotated map, the daily journal, etc. Why do we travel and what do we gain from visiting cultures and environments that may be unfamiliar? Writing and revising will be emphasized as creative ways of reflecting on the phenomenon of departure and return.