Transcultural Writing: Mobilities and Origins
The border passing at Colle del Piccolo San Bernando between France and Italy (2007).
Photo by Josef Schulz
The course asks how transcultural writers, past and present, construct auto-fictional journeys and postmigrant subjectivities as well as complex family narratives, and which forms this takes in their writing. Poised between mobilities and origins, between trajectories of the future and contingencies of birth, belongings and displacements, multilingualism and language loss, between memories and forgetting, hope and despair, the mundane and the extraordinary: what are their stories and how are they being told? Readings may include shorter prose texts and excerpts (in German and English) from Alina Bronsky, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Khuê Pham, Elias Canetti, Ronya Othmann, Julya Rabinowich, Saša Stanišic, Lea Ypi. Course grade is based on class work, journals, student projects, and a midterm.