First-Year Writing Seminar: Writing of Exile

Catalog description

How might exile help us think about the problem of nationalism in the modern era? Do those who write about or represent exile in the visual arts propose alternative senses of belonging to a particular group, such as a nationality, race, or ethnicity? And could their approaches help us rethink our fraught notions of social identity and community in the twenty-first century--a century still traversed by the mass dispersion of peoples across the globe? Writers of exile tend to tell stories about departure and return, about the difficulties of residing in a foreign land, or about estrangement in their own homeland. They frequently convey feelings of unease about inhabiting the border zones between at least two different nations, cultures, languages, traditions, or geographies. Yet at the same time they tend to articulate the space of the in-between as a locus for freedom and justice. In this seminar, we will consider the writing of exile in connection to related themes of mass displacement, migration, exodus, and refuge, with an emphasis on the Jewish and African diasporas, accompanied by a range of works from the Arab, Asian, and Latinx diasporas. We will read fiction and poetry by Gloria Anzaldúa, Aimé Césaire, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mahmoud Darwish, Assia Djebar, Edmond Jabès, Franz Kafka, and Claudia Rankine; as well as literary criticism and theory by Hélène Cixous, Zadie Smith, Paul Gilroy, Walter Benjamin, and Edward Said, among others; finally, we will watch a film by John Akomfrah exploring the digital archives of funk, jazz, and techno. The seminar will introduce first-year students to modern Francophone, Anglophone, and Comparative Literature and Theory, focusing on class discussion, close reading, and analytic writing.