ENG 4938 Caputi Fall 2019

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.) Required readings include classics by Aphra Behn, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, as well as more recent travel memoirs by women, such as Cheryl Strayed's best-seller, Wild.
Be advised that this course has a strict NO KINDLE POLICY. Required text-books are to be purchased in BOOK FORMAT ONLY.

This course fulfills the "W" requirement and the required Senior Seminar in the Major (Honors).