English 201: Shifting Grounds: Writing, Exile, and Migrancy

How do displacement, difference, and transfer mark the work of migrant writers? What kinds of cultural contests, exchange, violence, and absorption do these works portray as products of migration? How do they show people negotiating these processes at times of massive social and technological change? How do the aesthetics of border-crossing writers themselves reflect the conditions of migration? We will address such questions through a study of anxious introspection, contempt, anger, melancholy, and irony, as well as attitudes to cultural confusion and mixture, in works by Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth Bishop, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Colm Tóibín, Edward Said, and Edwidge Danticat. May be taken for credit toward the major's "Underrepresented Literatures" requirement.