German 580A
Transcultural Writing in German: Mobilities and Origins
The course asks how contemporary transcultural writers in German construct auto-fictional journeys and (post)migrant subjectivities and which forms this takes in their writing. Poised between mobilities and origins, between trajectories of the future and contingencies of birth, (be)longings and displacements, multilingualism and language loss, memories and forgetting, between hope and despair, the mundane and the extraordinary —what are their stories and how are they being told? Close readings include Julya Rabinowich: Spaltkopf (2008), Nava Ebrahimi: Sechzehn Wörter (2017), Saša Stanišić: Herkunft (2019); Ronya Othmann: Die Sommer (2020), and Abbas Khider: Der Erinnerungsfälscher (2022). The essays in Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah (eds.) Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (2020) will serve as a critical companion pieces along with other critical texts. Course requirements: Active participation/discussion, brief oral presentations, seminar paper (12-15pp.)