ENG 5517 Spring 2020 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, womxn 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") 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 womxn's empowerment within a given culture. Course readings include, but are not limited to: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre; Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément's The Newly-born Woman;; Toni Morrison's Sula; Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea; Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and Orlando; The course will conclude with a discussion of more recent, popular, travel memoirs by womxn such as Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and Cheryl Strayed (Wild).

NB. My courses are NOT TECH FRIENDLY. Students are required to purchase HARD COPIES of the assigned texts and (ADA exceptions aside)