This course considers a selection of stories told by immigrants to both the U.K. and the U.S. as we find them portrayed in various literary texts (short stories, poems, novels).
The authors to be included in this excursion into the “Literature of migration” come from diverse places (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka…); their stories and poems – situated both in those countries and cultures that they now call their home and in those that they left behind – span around many different topics and (immigrant) experiences. And yet they all have something in common: they have chosen to write in the language of the country they have migrated to, i.e. in English.
In their short stories, novels and poems, authors such as Hanif Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri or Michael Ondaatje give immigrants a voice. As students of the English language and culture we should be aware of these voices. In this course we will therefore take a closer look at selected examples and discuss some of the key questions raised in this particular field of literature.
(All texts will be distributed in class. They are taken from, for example, Jhumpa Lahiri’s the interpreter of maladies and unaccustomed earth; Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Muriel Spark’s stories collected in Caught between Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Short Stories (Klett); Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler and In the Skin of a Lion and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner)