ENGL 382 - Hotel Orient

FDR: HL
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring 2014 and alternate years

Prerequisite: ENGL 299 or instructor consent. This seminar charts the historical encounters between East and West through the very spaces that facilitate cross-cultural transactions from the medieval to the postmodern. If modern hotel consciousness is marked by transience, ennui, eroticism, and isolation, we ask whether or not the same characteristics held true in premodern hotel practices, and if the space of the Orient makes a difference in hotel writing. Semantically, “Orient” means not only the geographic east. As a verb, to orient means to position and ascertain one’s bearings. In this sense, to write about lodging in the East is to sort out one’s cultural and geopolitical orientation. Kao.