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01/29 - 05/18 | ||||||
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Subject: English (Grad) (GENG)
CRN: 21712
Lecture
St Paul: O'Shaughnessy Education Center 212
Travel, journey, voyage, sojourn, especially into a foreign land—the words are magic, and they evoke in us an opportunity for self-discovery and discovery of the new world. What about women’s travels or female travels imagined by women writers? Do these add additional “baggage”? Inspired by the burgeoning “literary mobility studies”—which include studies of travel writing, narratives of migration and the impact of wars and power hierarchies—this course examines a fantastic array of women’s writing, focusing on the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, when international traveling spread and became firmly established in cultural and literary discourse. The era’s important scientific and territorial “discoveries”—including Captain James Cook’s journeys to the Antipodes and to Hawaii and Mungo Park’s excursions to Africa—fed the reading public’s rising interests in the “outside” world, and literary writers met them with stories of the faraway lands. Women writers increasingly participated in this repertoire, exploring the theme of journeys into foreign lands. Spanning various genres (including poetry, novels, plays, epistolary forms, literary annuals, etc.), these women writers experimented with various literary trajectories usually assumed to be the prerogatives of male writers (Byron being the most celebrated case). Residing in distant times or traversing different geographical areas, their memorable characters seem to work as their avatars; and the “exotic” female characters reflect their own aspirations and anxieties. Thus these women writers challenged the cult of domesticity inculcated in women of the time on the one hand (by becoming authors and by shaping the general public’s imagination about women’s mobility), and commented on the prevailing ideologies of British nationalism and imperialism on the other. They revealed that individual and national identities were often socially constructed, and along gendered lines. These issues concerning mobility, emigration, science, nature, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, and transnational crossings resonate in our time as much as theirs. Course readings may include authors such as Madame de Graffigny (Letters from A Peruvian Woman, translated from French), Flora Tristan (Peregrinations of a Pariah), Mary Wollstonecraft (Letters from Scandinavia), Mary Shelley (Collected Tales and Stories; Lodore), Felicia Hemans (The Forest Sanctuary and other poems), Letitia Landon (Romance and Reality and poems), and Jemima Layton (Spanish Tales), along with secondary sources. This course satisfies the pre-1830 British literature requirement. Prerequisite: GENG 513 or permission of the instructor.
3 Credits