Spring 2014
22 Students
From the course catalog: Adventure uses an organization of the landscape that has influence far beyond the usual boundaries of fiction. This course examines the structuring elements of this traditionally masculine genre: who can be a hero? Where can heroes go, what do they receive when they arrive, and what happens when they come home? Who lives where in the spaces that such fiction explores? What characterizes the landscape of adventure fiction? Who can cross significant boundaries and who cannot? What gender and class demarcations do these fictions enforce? The course starts by reading two “boys’ books;” Treasure Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth and then examines the structures of the adventure genre in a series of fictions with girl and women heroes.