Admission requirements
None.
Description
To migrate, Salman Rushdie writes in Imaginary Homelands, is “to lose language and home, to be defined by others, to become invisible, or, even worse, a target; it is to experience deep changes and wrenches in the soul.” However, he adds, “the migrant is not simply transformed by [this] act; he [or she] transforms his new world” (210). In this course we will explore the ways in which first- and second generation immigrant writers as well as writers who are descendants of forced migrants to America testify to the complex transformations migration, diaspora, and exile have brought about and how in the process they have profoundly changed American literature in the past three decades. Complicating the idea of the United States as a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants, the recent immigrant and minority writers we’ll read imagine hybrid or multiple identities and alternative, multicultural and multiethnic, national and transnational communities. We will study literary works by Jewish American, Native American, African American, Chicana and Latino American, and Asian American writers as well as a few movies such as John Sayles’s Lone Star, focusing on the interrelated themes of diaspora and home(land); borders and border-crossings; exile and otherness; language and silence; gender and sexuality; trauma and memory; intercultural and generational conflict and reconciliation; race and ethnicity. We will also read a few theoretical texts about migration, ethnicity, and trauma. We’ll focus on U.S. literature and film, but will also explore the relevance of the insights gained to our own changing and globalizing communities today.
Course objectives
This course aims to:
develop students’ analytical and critical skills through in-depth reading of literary texts and films in their historical and cultural contexts;
introduce students to theoretical concepts in migration, ethnic and memory;
develop critical understanding of the concept of U.S. exceptionalism;
develop students’ skills to conduct independent research;
develop students’ oral and written communication skills;
develop their ability to apply theoretical and critical insights in a research essay.
Timetable
See timetable
Mode of instruction
- Seminar.
Course Load
Total course load 10 ec x 28 hours = 280 hours:
hours spent on attending seminars: 40 hours;
time for studying the required literature and film screening: 120 hours;
time to prepare presentation and write a research proposal and essay (including research): 120 hours.
Assessment method
Assessment
oral presentation and discussion (30%);
research essay (c. 4000 words; 70%).
Weighing
The final grade for the course is established by determining the weighted average.
Resit
If the final grade is insufficient, only the research essay can be rewritten.
Exam review
How and when a review of the written paper will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the results, a review of the written paper will have to be organised.
Blackboard
Yes Blackboard will be used for:
announcements;
assignments;
literature.
Reading list
- Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (Persea Books);
- Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (Vintage);
- Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. (Aunt Lute);
- T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (Penguin);
- James Welch, Winter in the Blood (Penguin);
- Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (Bantam);
- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Vintage);
- Kiran Desai, The Inheritance o Loss (Grove Press);
- Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Plume);
- John Sayles, dir. Lone Star, DVD
Registration
Via uSis.
Registration Studeren à la carte and Contractonderwijs
Not applicable.
Remarks
None.