This course invites critical thinking about voyages of homecoming in literary texts. We will begin by discussing how narratives of departure and return structure our everyday lives and notions of identity and place. As we read texts that foreground the homecoming of people and objects, we will focus on how home, family, elders, and memory are grounded or uprooted by journeys to and from origins. We will inquire how literary closure and endings are structured by patterns of return, and account for homecomings that forge new origins or leave them behind. Beginning with the genre of the `romance epic’ we will read selections of Homer’s Odyssey and compare it with its partner poem, the Iliad. We will then read passages from romances that follow in the wake of the Odyssey and respond to its themes: journeys of loss and discovery, such as the Argonautica and the Aeneid, medieval travel narratives like Il Milione, even passages from James Joyce’s modern prose epic, Ulysses. Along the way we will read from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and Purgatorio, novellas by Giovanni Boccaccio, excerpts from a cycle of Renaissance poems about the knight Orlando, and a novel by Italo Calvino, Il cavaliere inesistente. Finally, we will watch clips of films by Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni that capture voyages and returns on the screen.

This course is primarily designed to prepare student for critical thinking, reading, and writing at a college level. Assignments include three argumentative essays that increase in length with drafts, smaller written assignments that prepare us for discussion, and careful reflections on the readings as journal entries.

All readings are in English and provided in a digital format.

Due to the high demand for R&C courses we monitor attendance very carefully. Attendance is mandatory the first two weeks of classes, this includes all enrolled and wait listed students. If you do not attend all classes the first two weeks you may be dropped. If you are attempting to add into this class during weeks 1 and 2 and did not attend the first day, you will be expected to attend all class meetings thereafter and, if space permits, you may be enrolled from the wait list.