Fall 2002: Destinations:
New Meanings of Travel
By devoting the fall semester of 2002 to the theme of "Destinations:
New Meanings of Travel," the Weissman Center for Leadership
at Mount Holyoke College hopes to spark lively discussion on our
shifting ideas about ravel. We hope to highlight several developments.
First, the ways in which "globalization" in its various
forms--cultural, economic, and demographic--has changed our sense
of travel. Second, the traumatic effects of September 11 on our
emotional response to travel. And third, the rise of new ways
of writing and thinking about travel, during a period in which
the meaning of "travel" often merges with "travail."
We want to pose what the poet Elizabeth Bishop called the "Questions
of Travel"--to ask, in a deep sense, where it is we are going.
"More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors,"
Bishop wrote in her poem "The Map." The Weissman Center
has worked closely with other institutions on the Mount Holyoke
Campus, including the Art Museum, the Arts Group, and the Center
for Environmental Literacy, to offer a rich and provocative array
of events under the theme of "Destinations."
September 12 , 2002
"Moving Around a Moving World: Travel as Modern Reality"
Lecture by Pico Iyer
"Travel is pilgrimage, quest and adventure, but it is also
a fact of life for more and more people who live between cultures
in a world propelled out of its old co-ordinates. What happens
when humans fly outside the old categories, and can--or even
must--live in ways that humans have never lived before?"
Born in England, to Indian parents, raised in California and
now living in Japan, Pico
Iyer spends much of his life in motion. A longtime essayist
for Time, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of
Books, Harper's and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, among many
other periodicals, he has been writing, for almost twenty years
now, about how cultures meet, romance one another and project
their various designs upon the Other. His books include Video
Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Cuba and the Night
(a novel) and, most recently, The Global Soul.
October 25, 2002
"Monet and the Tourist View"
by Robert Herbert
Impressionism scholar and Mount Holyoke Professor Emeritus of
Humanities Robert Herbert will lecture on "Monet and the
Tourist View."
November 14, 2002
"New Meanings of Travel"
Panel discussion
Weissman Center panel on "New Meanings of Travel" with
professor Michael Gorra of Smith College as moderator and: Ian
Buruma, writer on Chinese dissidents, contemporary Japan and Germany
(Bad Elements, Anglomania, The Wages of Guilt); Nancy Novogrod,
editor-in-chief of Travel + Leisure magazine and MHC alum and
former trustee; Caryl
Phillips, West Indian novelist and travel writer (Cambridge, The Final Passage, etc.).
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