American Migrant Fictions

Dr. Sonia Weiner

This course will engage with late twentieth and early twenty-first century American migrant fiction. The authors we will examine will be seen to inhabit a space located in between cultures, languages and national borders, a space characterized by fluidity, mobility and dislocation. We will explore the ways in which their nonhomogeneous, nonlinear and non-chronological experience of space-time are translated onto the form and structure of the novel. In the process of redefining what constitutes home – geographically, culturally, and linguistically – the migrant writers confront questions of memory and loss, difference and similarity, distance and proximity, translation and trans-creation. The new perspectives created by the authors suggests their unwillingness to 'overcome' or 'resolve' the migrant duality; rather, they seek to benefit from their excess of roots, and in doing so, continue to define what it means to be ‘American.’

Authors to be studied include Maxine Hong Kingston, Junot Díaz, Aleksandar Hemon, Jhumpa Lahiri, GB Tran, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Rabih Alameddine.

Course requirements:

Attendance – come prepared (i.e. READ)

Midterm: In-class written exam 40%

Final: Take-home paper 60%