ENG 5933 Spring 2018 Caputi

“ '. . .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 "the traffic in women"--as wives or as slaves) 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. (Never mind the mere right to operate a motor vehicle--only recently granted to Saudi women.) Course readings include, but are not limited to: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "Turkish Embassy Letters"; Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and Orlando; Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément's The Newly-born Woman; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior; Toni Morrison's Beloved; and Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis. The course will conclude with a discussion of more recent, popular, travel memoirs by women such as Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and Cheryl Strayed (Wild).

NB. My courses are NOT Kindle-friendly. Students are strongly urged to purchase hard copies of all assigned readings.