LIT 5388 Spring 2022

“‘… As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.’” —Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

This course is premised on the notion of travel and mobility as feminist issues. From Chaucer’s Wife of Bath onward, women who “get around” have been viewed with fascination and loathing by masculinist-xenophobic ideologues, and female mobility (when not enforced by what Gayle Rubin famously termed “the traffic in women”) has been stigmatized, eroticized, exoticized, and demonized. At the same time, having the means to travel—and the intellectual and spiritual freedom travel proffers—can be celebrated as marks of an individual woman’s empowerment within a given culture. In this course we will explore journey narratives and tropes of mobility in literature by women from a number of theoretical perspectives. Featured authors include Toni Morrison, Marjane Satrapi, Cheryl Strayed, Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf. Requirements include weekly reading response papers; active participation; final paper; presentation.