The Traveler’s Gaze Essay

With this essay I want you to choose a film or magazine (with photographs) where other places and people are represented apart from your home. As your book defines it, the traveler’s gaze involves both identification and difference and these terms are not necessarily binary opposites. You will argue that the images or photographs you see are not a good representation of what is real. This will be your thesis. You then will explore why these images or photographs are not good representations. These will be your supporting reasons.

Many films out there take you to other places. Ask yourself, does this film represent these people or places well, or is there some underlying ideology that clouds this representation within this film? What is this ideology? How does it change our view on these people and their surroundings? You may want to apply the same kind of approach to the people you see in magazines like the National Geographic. How do you see yourself compared to their faces? What differences do you see?

In the recent film Inception, for example, I could argue that the foreign places represented in Japan, and then in South America, emphasize a dream landscape, and therefore are not good representations of the real. People within these landscapes become caricatures of real people. I would want to build upon the differences of these people, analyzing them closely in order to reveal an ideology of the “subconscious”—the way these people seem more like symbols of a Freudian world and not real.

Like the previous essays, I expect that you will not only use the source material in the book but also with outside sources. This essay should be five to seven pages long and have at least three to five sources.

View the Assignment Guidelines.

Click here to submit Assignment 2B to the Dropobox.

bulletRevision Guide Assignment 2B (20 points)

Download and complete the Revision Guide for Assignment 2B before submitting Assignment 2B. Answer each question carefully. This revision guide is meant to force you to revise, so I would suggest that you have someone else revise it for you.  A good place to start might be the OU Writing Center.  If you do not fill out the revision guide completely your grade for this assignment will be penalized accordingly.

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