ENG 4938 Caputi Fall 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 power, and female mobility (when not enforced by what Gayle Rubin 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. This course examines tropes of mobility and journey narratives in literature by women, both well-traveled and famously reclusive.