LIT 5309 - FALL 2026 - CAPUTI

This course is structured on a series of book/film pairings involving women travelers and tropes of (im)mobility. Given the historic injunction to domesticity and the prohibition of female mobility (or, in my shorthand, fem(m)obility), is travel for women on their own terms synonymous with empowerment? Under what circumstances is the freedom to travel compromised and/or complicit in class and/or cultural hierarchies that are otherwise oppressive? Under what circumstances, contrariwise, is it a mark of an individual's transnationalist and/or intersectionalist positioning? These are some of the questions that will drive our discussions this semester.