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 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 migration to America testify to the complex transformations the act of migration has brought about and how in the process they have profoundly changed American literature, especially in the past 25 years. 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 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 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.
Course objectives
This course aims to develop students’ analytical and critical skills through in-depth reading of literary texts and a few films in their historical and cultural contexts. This course will also introduce students to some basic theoretical concepts in migration and ethnic studies.
Timetable
The timetable will be available by June 1st at www.hum.leidenuniv.nl/engels.
Mode of instruction
Two-hour seminar per week.
Assessment method
Oral presentation and discussion (30%) and essay (c. 4000 words; 70%).
Blackboard
.At least two weeks before the course starts, the Blackboard site will be open for self-enrolment. There you can find the course syllabus.
Reading list
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (Persea Books)
Louise Erdrich, Tracks (Harper Perennial)
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove Press)
Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (Bantam)
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (Vintage)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd ed. (Aunt Lute)
Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Plume)
Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (Vintage)
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (Vintage)
Registration
Students should register through uSis.
Contact information
Departmental Office English Language and Culture, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 102C. Tel. 071 5272144; mail: english@hum.leidenuniv.nl.
Coordinator of Studies Master: Ms. K. van der Zeeuw-Filemon, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 103C.
Remarks
No remarks.