Anotace
OBJECTIVES
This course discusses selected texts that focus on the experience of migration and immigration, primarily to the United States. Writers under review include Anzia Yezierska and Claude McKay, as well as more contemporary authors such as Jamaica Kincaid and Junot Díaz. Fictional texts are supplemented with theoretical reflections of critics including Werner Sollors, Edward Said, William Boelhower, Franco Moretti, Trinh T. Minh-ha and others.
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY MATERIAL
Adamic, Louis. Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America. New York: Arno, 1932.
Ahmed, Sara. "Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement." International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.3 (1999).
Bales, Kevin and Zoe Trodd. "Afterword: All of It is Now." Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Benstock, Shari. "Expatriate Modernism: Writing on the Cultural Rim." Women's Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Bigsby, Christopher. "What, then, is the American?" The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture, ed. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Boelhower, William. "The Brave New World of Immigrant Autobiography." MELUS 9.2 (1982).
Boelhower, William. "Immigrant Novel as Genre." MELUS 8.1 (1981).
Cather, Willa. "The Bohemian Girl." The Bohemian Girl: Stories. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.
Chaney, Michael. "International Contexts of the Negro Renaissance." The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaisance, ed. George Hutchinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. "What is Socialist Feminism?" Monthly Review July 1, 2005.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild. "Introduction." Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. New York: A Metropolitan/Owl Book, 2003.
Gunew, Sneja. "Technologies of the Self: Corporeal Affects of English." SAQ 100.3 (2001).
Honig, Bonnie. "'Immigrant America?' How Foreigness 'Solves' Democracy's Problems." Social Text 56 (1998). hooks, bell. "Preface" and "Introduction." Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Leveen, Lois. "Only When I Laugh: Textual Dynamics of Ethnic Humor." MELUS 21.4 (1996).
McKay, Claude. Complete Poems. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. (selected poems)
Minh-ha, Trinh T. "Other Than Myself/My Other Self." Travellers' Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Moretti, Franco. "Conjectures on World Literature." New Left Review 1 (2000) and "More Conjectures." New Left Review 20 (2003).
Mouffe, Chantal. "For a Politics of Nomadic Identity." Traveller's Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam. London: Routledge, 1994.
Mukherjee, Bharati. "Immigrant Writing: Changing the Contours of a National Literature." American Literary History 23.3 (2011).
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. New York: Random House, 2011.
Said, Edward W. "Reflections on Exile." Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. "Wrestling Your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice." Women's Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Sollors, Werner. "Nine Suggestions for Historians of American Ethnic Literature." MELUS 11.1 (1984).
Sollors, Werner. "Ethnic Themes, Modern Themes." The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 6, Prose Writing, 1910-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Sontag, Susan. In America. London: Penguin, 2009.
Stein, Gertrude. "The Good Anna." Three Lives. New York: Signet, 1985.
Suvin, Darko. "Displaced Persons." New Left Review 31 (2005).
Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. New York: Persea Books, 2003.
Wald, Alan. "Theorizing Cultural Difference: A Critique of the 'Ethnicity School.'" MELUS 14.2 (1987).
Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer. "Always Coming Home, in America: Enacting the Romance of Community." Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
ASSESSMENT
To receive their credits, students must attend at least 70% of seminars, deliver an oral presentation and submit an essay of 3000-4000 words. Please consult "Essay Guidelines" at https://ualk.ff.cuni.cz/ for general writing guidelines and submit an approximately 100-word proposal in advance (a preliminary bibliography should be included as well). Essays must be submitted electronically by February 16, 2024.