HENK03905U English - Free topic 7: Transnational Literatures of Travel, Exchange, and Immigration (exam form A,B,C)

After transatlantic travel grew affordable for middle-class Americans and Europeans in the first half of the nineteenth century, travelogues recording journeys on both sides of the Atlantic became one of the most popular literary forms, allowing both professional and amateur writers to publish their experiences. A few decades later, waves of immigration established a vibrant immigrant culture and literature that grew into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the Anglophone world. This course will consider a broad range of Anglophone literatures of immigration, spanning nonfiction, poetry, and prose as well genre-bending forms such as Dave Eggers’s fictionalized memoir of a Sudanese-American refugee, What is the What (2006), and the semi-autobiographical novel Giants in the Earth (1924) by Norwegian-American immigrant Ole Rolvaag. Other reading may include fiction by British-American writer Susanna Rowson, European travel writing by American novelist Mark Twain, non-fiction by Danish-American reform writer Jacob Riis, and fiction by British-Jamaican writer Zadie Smith. Scholarly articles by writers such as Werner Sollars and Alan Trachtenberg will provide critical and historical context. Questions that we will consider in our discussions and work for the class include the place of multi-lingual writing in national canons, the role of the immigrant in definitions of nation, and conventions of travel writing and “touristing.”