• Offered for Year: 2026/27

• Module Leader(s): Dr Gillian Jein

• Owning School: Modern Languages
• Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus

Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Aims

Module Description
This module examines how cultures represent and make sense of one another through textual and visual representations of travel and the foreign—forms historically shaped by pilgrimage, exploration, education, trade, war, and imperial expansion. Narratives of “elsewhere” have been central to the construction of unequal global power relations, producing enduring ideas about human and more-than-human difference and helping to legitimise colonial domination and socio-environmental exploitation.

Drawing on literature and film from French and Francophone contexts, the module traces how representations of travel have both reinforced and contested these narratives across time. We place novels, memoirs, essays, reportage, and cinema in dialogue with key debates in postcolonial studies, cultural geography, and environmental humanities. Students will develop the critical tools to analyse how stories and images of distance, encounter, and mobility shape perceptions of identity, otherness, belonging, and responsibility in a rapidly changing world.

Module Aims
Through seminars, lectures, and creative methods, this module aims to develop students’ understanding of how textual-visual representations of travel relate to contemporary global challenges by critically and creatively examining:

a) the links between travel, representation and power, and the production of knowledge about foreign places and cultures;
b) the construction of difference and the role of representations of the foreign in practices of othering and relational sense-making around “us” and “them”, “here” and “there”, “near” and “far”;
c) understandings of belonging and displacement, and representations of travel as resources for thinking about rooting, uprooting, migration, settlement, and exile;
d) the circulation of ideas about nature, environmental destruction and indigenous knowledges through literary and cinematic encounters with place;
e) the representation of technology in place-making in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and its role in enabling, mediating, and controlling mobility.

Further, the module aims to provide students with:

Interdisciplinary skills for combining critical thinking across literature, film, visual culture, social analysis, and environmental inquiry.

Opportunities for fieldwork and creative projects that connect conceptual learning to practical methods of analysis and representation.

Cultural and critical resources for engaging with pressing global challenges, including migration, colonial histories, geopolitical inequality, and environmental justice.

For students of language, advanced linguistic and analytical development in French through sustained engagement with complex texts and audiovisual materials.

Outline Of Syllabus

This module investigates how French and Francophone texts and films imagine the foreign through travel and encounter.Historically, accounts of foreign lands and peoples have played a significant role in shaping global imaginaries and power relations, influencing how societies have understood difference, identity, and belonging. The module explores how representations of distant places and cultural encounters have variously reinforced stereotypes, enabled unequal forms of exchange, and justified extractive relationships with people and environments. At the same time, it highlights the ways modern and contemporary works reframe travel and encounter as sites of critique, curiosity, and ethical reflection.

While acknowledging the historical complicity of these representational traditions in colonialism, the module adopts a dual approach: it critically interrogates imperial legacies while tracing how modern and contemporary narratives—across essayistic writing, fiction, memoir, documentary, and cinema—challenge inherited frameworks of difference. From the Brazilian jungle to the Arizona desert, the skyscrapers of New York to the seabed of the Atlantic, students will engage with works spanning multiple genres, periods, and geographies. These texts and films illuminate intellectual debates about global politics, environmental justice, and identity, while also demonstrating how representations of travel can sediment, complicate, and unsettle normative worldviews.

Students will therefore explore how literary and cinematic engagements with mobility, encounter, and distance reflect broader cultural debates about geopolitics, ecological crisis, race, and belonging. This exploration is enhanced through reflective and creative practices—such as walk-based research, peer-to-peer discussion, photographic storytelling and/or journal writing—allowing students to connect critical analysis to ethnographic attentiveness and inventive modes of representation across assessments.

Through lectures, seminars, and practice-based activities, students will analyse how representations of travel mediate encounters with other cultures, frame experiences of belonging and displacement, and shape ethical and aesthetic understandings of the world. By situating these representations at the intersection of literature, film, history, and cultural geography, the module equips students with interdisciplinary tools for evaluating the evolving cultural work of travel in the production—and contestation—of global inequalities. It thus offers a rigorous and engaging framework for understanding how narratives and images of elsewhere continue to inform contemporary worldviews.

Course Content

The module begins by inviting students to reflect critically on the concept of “travel” and to explore the genre-defying range of texts and films that represent mobility and encounter. Emphasis is placed on the diversity and complexity of these forms, alongside a discussion of analytical approaches to their historical, political, and aesthetic stakes.

Subsequent weeks are structured around key themes. These include the relationship between travel, representation and power; engagements with nature and environmental concerns; and the construction of otherness through textual and visual culture. Additional topics examine how representations of travel contribute to place-making and memory, how they respond to postcolonial critique, and how they operate across media—especially the productive crossings between literature, film, and photography. Together, these sessions provide students with a coherent and expansive framework for understanding how textual-visual representations of the foreign shape cultural, social, and environmental imaginaries.

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

The Module’s primary corpus will meet all Knowledge Outcomes by enabling students to engage with travel representations that challenge generic categories and which emerges from a number of critical fields - including political philosophy, anthropology, cultural geography, environmental science and autobiography. Students will read/watch extracts each week from one travel account. Students studying French will read in the original language. Translations will be provided for those students from other schools within HASS.

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities:
1) Module talk to orient students and facilitate their awareness of the need for independent learning, self-reflection and to introduce them to the module themes and objectives. (KO1)
2) Lecture Materials: Lectures will model academic presentation for students, situate the significance of cultural materials, and provide critical and contextual information in order to support independent reading for the themed session. (KO1, KO2, KO6)
3) Weekly 2-hour seminars will provide students with opportunity to discuss their guided research and work with peers to develop their critical thinking and ideas. (KO1-7, IS1-6)
4) Fieldwork: Students will be guided in methods of dérive to explore the city centre of Newcastle. Working in small groups, they will choose a theme from the course and focus on this aspect as they walk through the city. As a group they will then reflect on this method, and design individual blogs based on their experience. This activity is designed to put into practice important conceptual tropes around travel and travel writing. (KO2, KO3, IS1, IS2, IS4)
5) Workshops: These will enable students to raise questions and gain skills in relation to essay planning and writing. (KO3, KO5, IS1–5)

Structured Research & Reading Activities:
Students read 1-2 article-length primary materials weekly. Accompanied by guided questions to facilitate student engagement and encourage close reading. Writing: To ensure reading is engaged, students have the option to write a formative 200-word response to set material. Either to answer guiding questions or link text from one week to a text from another. Student responses will submitted online via CANVAS in advance of scheduled small group session. Module Leader provides individual feedback and draws on responses to develop student discussion in small group scheduled sessions. (KO1-7, IS3-6)

Student-led Group Activity:
Students will work together in small groups to present their reflections and findings from fieldwork, which they will then shape into an individual assessed blog. (IS3, IS4, IS6) (KO1, KO2, LLO3, KO5, KO7)

Guided Independent Study: Students' independent learning will be encouraged through weekly writing tasks, and supported through open questions, a module workbook and bibliographical materials. Students will have the opportunity to share their out-of-class findings with the cohort each week and to integrate their independent research into their assessments. (IS1, IS3, IS4, IS5, IS6) (KO1-7)

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Other Assessment

Formative Assessments

Formative Assessment is an assessment which develops your skills in being assessed, allows for you to receive feedback, and prepares you for being assessed. However, it does not count to your final mark.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The assessed components of this module are designed to achieve the knowledge and skills outcomes.

The final set essay will test students' level in relation to all Knowledge Outcomes. This essay will be written in response to one of a number of open questions. In the essay workshop, students will be encouraged to appropriate a question and consider which primary sources they will use to address it. The essay will require students to undertake close analysis of the primary source, while framing this analysis in relation to one or more critical approaches and situating the text historically.

The reflective log is designed to support students in the pre-writing and research phase of the essay assignment. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks explored in weekly sessions, students will engage creatively with the city during the fieldwork activity and write a travel blog based on this practice.

Formative assessment is designed to support students' success in the summative assignments. The formative reflective log is designed to facilitate progression in the students' analytical capacity. It will require students to engage closely with a set text and to read the text in correspondence with the background provided by the lecture, and other primary sources. Feedback and class discussion will frame this exercise and therefore enhance students' capacity for engagement with feedback, while building confidence in linguistic comprehension, reading and writing skills.

Reading Lists

• FRE4020's Reading List

Timetable

• Timetable Website: www.ncl.ac.uk/timetable/
• FRE4020's Timetable