26028 - Women's Travel Literature

Learning outcomes

The student acquires historical and literary knowledge of women's popular culture with specific reference to travel literature and critical utopias, within a gender perspective.

Course contents

At the end of the course, students: - are able to investigate the specificity of gender as “travelling concept” from the perspective of race, ethicity and class in the literary dimension; - have the methodological tools to analyze different forms of literary and visual texts where issues of gender, sexualities, subjectivities and bodies are at stake, with spacial focus on authoriality; - acquire knowledge of the principal questions on gender studies and queer theories in international debates; - understand the notion of “transmedia adaptation” in relation to how texts written in the past literary scenario change thanks to the interaction with contemporary visual technologies.

The course aims at exploring the notion of “travel” through the analysis of the novel Orlando (1928) by Virginia Woolf, a fictional biography of a journey through history and particularly through bodies and genders, by adopting a critical perspective on both narrative and non-fictional literary genres.
The first part of the course will be devoted to the analysis of the historical and literary context within which the work was born and it will focus in particular on: Virginia Woolf and modernist experimentation; the “sexual/textual politics” of Woolf's aesthetic; the relationship with the Bloomsbury group; the cultural background on sexuality, androgyny, homosexuality and gender that this work mobilizes. Special attention will be devoted to the close reading of the texts. In the second part of the course, some of the transmedia adaptations of the work will be analysed adopting a feminist perspective, with particular reference to Sally Potter's film adaptation (1992), and the trans* perspective, in its most recent queer interpretation with Paul B. Preciado's documentary (2023).

Readings/Bibliography

Primary sources:

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928)

Sally Potter, Orlando (1992)

Paul B. Preciado, Orlando. My Political Biography (2023)

Bibliography of critical texts (essays, articles, volumes). Lessons will make reference to the following critical sources:

- Jessica Berman (ed.), A Companion to Virginia Woolf, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Selected chapters.

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York - London, 1990.

- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge [1970], Penguin, London, 2008.

- Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998.

- Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2017.

- Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge, New York-London, 2006.

- Earl G. Ingersoll, Screening Woolf: Virginia Woolf on/and/in Film, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016. (In particular: Chapter Three: "Orlando Sally Potter’s Success Story (1992)", pp. 55-82). (available online).

- Jane Marcus, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, Macmillan, London-Basingstoke, 1981. Selected Chapters.

- Melanie Micir, "Queer Woolf", in Jessica Berman (ed.), A Companion to Virginia Woolf, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 347-58 (available online).

- Toril Moi, “Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Feminist Readings of Woolf” in Sextual/Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory, Routledge, London – New York, 1985.

- Rita Monticelli, The Politics of the Body in Women's Literatures, Bologna, I Libri di Emil - Odoya, 2012.

- Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", in Screen, 16 (3), pp. 6–18 (available online).

- Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus, Chronicles of Crossing, Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, CA, 2019. (In particular the following chapters: "Introduction. An Apartment on Uranus", "Chronicles of the Crossing", "The Courage To Be Yourself", "Trans Catalonia", "Orlando on the Road"). (available online).

- Adrienne Rich (1980), Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, Journal of Women's History, Volume 15, Number 3, Autumn 2003, pp. 11-48. (available online).

- Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010 (In particular Chapter 8: Laura Marcus, "Woolf's Feminism and Feminism's Woolf", pp. 142-179). 

- Susan Sontag (1964), "Notes on "Camp"", in Against Interpretation and other essays (1966), any edition (available online).

- Virginia Woolf (19299, A Room of One's Own, any edition.

- Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow, Hogarth Press, London, 1960.

- Virginia Woolf, “Sketch of the Past ˮ, in Schulkind, J. (ed.), Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind, New York: Harcourt, 1985.

Teaching methods

Lessons, seminars and discussions. Course attendance is highly recommended and students will be required to actively participate in class discussion.

Language: English

Assessment methods

Final oral exam. Attendance and class partecipation will also be assessed as a component of the final overall mark. Students are requested to analyse the 3 primary sources and articles/essays/chapters (about 150 pages not from a single volume) from the Reading list of the Secondary sources.

Please do check this web page for further notice and information

Teaching tools

Literary and critical texts; power point presentations; movies and videos.

Office hours

See the website of Cristina Gamberi