Traveling with Goethe: A “Grand Tour” for Students Based on Goethe’s Italian Journey and Other Travel Writings
Markus Dubischar (Lafayette College)
This paper will discuss an innovative interim course abroad that has proven to be a successful and impactful undergraduate Classics offering, open to students of all majors. The basic principles that inform this course can also be applied to other settings. The two-and-a-half-week interim course follows a centuries-old travel route into and through Italy. The course is innovative because it is a travel course in a double sense. Students travel to Italy, with Rome at the journey’s thematic center, and they learn about the practice of traveling in the past, especially the tradition of the Grand Tour (Black 2003; Pine-Coffin 1974). A compressed version of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s itinerary in 1786-88, famously described in his Italian Journey, forms the course’s backbone. The itinerary’s main stations and points of interest are Munich with nearby Regensburg (Castra Regina); the Brenner Pass in the Tyrolean Alps; Verona; Rome; Pompeii with Naples and Herculaneum. An additional course component that deepens student learning is readings and discussions of travel writings about Italy from past centuries (Korte 2015). In addition to Goethe’s Italian Journey (1817/18) the students also read and discuss excerpts from Charles Dickens’ Pictures of Italy (1846), Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869), and Henry James’ Italian Hours (1909). These authors’ keen observations and reflections add a valuable layer of perspective to the students’ own travel experience (Kinsley 2015). The presentation will discuss (1) which factors make this course a high-impact educational experience (Kuh 2008), (2) what changes will be made next in the course’s ongoing evolution (Dolan 2001; Geurts 2020; Griffin/Fish 1998), (3) and how the course’s pedagogical and structural approach can be applied to other institutional contexts and travel destinations.
Select Bibliography
1. Primary Authors
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy: With an Introduction by Sacheverell Sitwell, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991 (first published in 1846).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey, edited by Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, translated by Robert R. Heitner. New York: Suhrkamp, 1989 (first published 1816-1817).
James, Henry. Italian Hours, edited by John Auchard. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992 (first published in 1909).
Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad, foreword by Shelly Fisher Fishkin, introduction by Mordecai Richler, afterword by David E.E. Sloane. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996. First published in 1869.
2. Secondary Literature
Black, Jeremey. Italy and the Grand Tour. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Dolan, Brian. Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe. London/New York: Harper Collins, 2001.
Geurts, Anna P.H. “Gender, Curiosity, and the Grand Tour: Late-Eighteenth-Century British Travel Writing.” Journeys 21.2 (2020): 1-23.
Griffin, Farah J. and Cheryl J. Fish, eds. A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.
Korte, Barbara. “Western Travel Writing, 1750-1950.” In The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Carl. Thompson, 173-184. London: Routledge, 2015.
Kuh, George D. High Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2008.
Kinsley, Zoë. “Travellers and Tourists.” In The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Carl. Thompson, 237-245. London: Routledge, 2015.
Pine-Coffin, R. S. Bibliography of British and American Travel in Italy to 1860. Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 1974.