Topic list for individual projects, with bibliography



1. Open Polar Seas, Symmes's Hole, and fictions of Antarctica:
Fiction: Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "MS. Found in a Bottle"; Verne, An Antarctic Mystery/The Sphinx of the Ice; H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of the Moon; Mat Johnson, Pym; Auster, City of Glass. Nonfiction: Reynolds, The Private Journal of William Reynolds: United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842; Philbrick, Sea of Glory. Film: Forbidden Quest (Peter Delpeut).
2. "Darkest" Africa and its fictions
Nonfiction: Dugard, Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone; Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer; Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Armah, Two Thousand Seasons; Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Fiction: Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
3. The Lost Franklin Expedition 
Fiction: Nadolny, The Discovery of Slowness; Fortier, The Proper Use of Stars; Vollman, The Rifles; Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here. Nonfiction: Potter, Finding Franklin; Brandt; The Man Who Ate His Boots; McClintock, The Voyage of the "Fox" in Arctic Seas; Geiger and Beattie, Frozen in Time.
4. Lighting out for the Territory: Westward Exploration in the U.S.
Nonfiction: Fenster, Jefferson's America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation; Lavender and Ebert, Westward Vision: The Story of the Oregon Trail; Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey. Fiction: Bertozzi, Lewis and Clark (graphic novel); Wilder, the Little House on the Prairie series; Twain, Huckleberry Finn.
5. Mapping the real and the imaginary
Fiction: Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet; Fonstad, The Atlas of Middle-Earth. Nonfiction: Brooke-Hitching, The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps; Hayes, Historical Atlas of the Arctic; Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination; Ekman, Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings.
6. Exploration and Race
Nonfiction: Counter, North Pole Legacy: Black, White, and Eskimo; Kpomassie, An African in Greenland; Schwartz, First Man: Reimagining Matthew Henson; Haskins, Against All Opposition: Black Explorers in America.
7. Exploration and Gender
Nonfiction: Polk, Women of Discovery; Nielsen, Icebound: A Woman's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole; Hubbard, The Woman Who Mapped Labrador; Thayer: Polar Dream; Markham, West With the Night; Olds, Women of the Four Winds; Herbert, Polar Wives.
8. Exploration and/as Colonialism
Nonfiction: Ruby, Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony; Vaughan, Northwest Greenland: A History; Axelsson, Last Days of the Arctic; KolodnyIn Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery. Fiction: Flanagan, Wanting: A Novel; Stenson, The Trade; Vollman, The Rifles (Seven Dreams); Finley, The Accidental Indies.
9. Inuit and other indigenous Northern Peoples
Nonfiction: Crowe, A History of the Original Peoples of Northern Canada; Millman, A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Folk Tales; Ipellie, The Inuit Thought of It, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares; Steckley, White Lies About the Inuit; Stern, Historical Dictionary of the Inuit; Kent, The Sámi People of the North: A Social and Cultural History. Fiction: Heighton, Afterlands; Freuchen, Eskimo; Ipellie, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares.
10. Exploration in film and television
South (1919); The Romance of the Far Fur Country (1919); Nanook of the North (1922); The Man from Beyond (1922); Laila (1929); Eskimo (1933); The Savage Innocents (1963); Buried in Ice (1988); Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997); Arctic Passage: Prisoners of the Ice (2005); The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006); Abandoned in the Arctic (2007); Arctic Ghost Ship (2015)
11. To Infinity and Beyond: The Stakes of Space
Nonfiction: NASA, Why We Explore; Piantadosi, Mankind Beyond Earth: The History, Science, and Future of Human Space Exploration; Sagan, Cosmos; Capelotti, The Human Archaeology of Space: Lunar, Planetary and Interstellar Relics of Exploration. Fiction: Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles; Mitsuse, Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights; Lessing, Canopus in Argos: Archives
12. Anthropology, the"disinterested" science?
Nonfiction: Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; Harper, Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo; Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family; Boas, Franz Boas Among the Inuit of Baffin Island; Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Culture. Fiction: Rhodes, The Last Safari.