Travel Narratives for Seminar Assessment

As a final, qualitative assessment of the seminar, I ask each seminarian to compose a travel narrative recounting her own experiences. The narrative (of some 500 words) is to be composed following the seminar, on reflection, and sent to me by private e-mail message. (Please indicate whether it is OK to post your narrative with others in the web archives of the seminar.)

You may be familiar with such modern narratives as William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways or Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, but travel narrative as a literary form was immensely popular in the 19^th century. From the plains we have, for example, The Commerce of the Prairies, Josiah Gregg’s account of adventures in the Santa Fe trade, as well as The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman’s narrative of his quest in search of wild Indians at war.

That word, “quest,” leads to a delineation of the typical form of the travel narrative. In such a narrative, our hero (the writer) leaves home, usually deliberately, on a quest (such as Parkman’s search for wild Indians). In the course of his travels, he sees exotic lands and peoples. Then he returns home to write about them, and also to reflect on how he has been changed by the experience.

What I ask you to do, then, is to tell your story in relation to the seminar. You left home looking for something, saw things, experienced things. Now you tell about them, muse upon them, and consider whether the experience wrought any change. That sounds to me like a good, qualitative assessment of the seminar experience from the individual standpoint.

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