Of Tourists and Travelers: Travel, Identity, and Empathy in Peninsular Spanish Literature

In this course students will explore the representation of travel and cultural encounters from the Romantic gaze of the nineteenth century to contemporary fiction. We will apply a theoretical framework to the analysis of Peninsular literary texts to address a simple question: what is the difference between a tourist and a traveler? The answer will reveal fundamentally different ways of relating to the unknown, to cultural otherness, and ultimately to oneself.