LIT 5388 Caputi Spring 2021

“‘…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 terms “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 tropes of mobility and journey-narratives in literature by women from a number of theoretical perspectives. Here are highlights from a tentative reading list: Mary Wollstonecraft’s travel letters, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Orlando; Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s The Newly Born Woman; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis; Cheryl Strayed's Wild.