Transcultural Writing: Mobilities and Origins
The course asks how transcultural writers, past and present, construct auto-fictional journeys and postmigrant subjectivities in the context of complex scenarios, 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, performance and authenticity, the mundane and the extraordinary: What are their stories and how are they being told? Readings by Alina Bronsky, Stefan Zweig, Elias Canetti, Ronya Othmann, Vina Yun, Mithu Sanyal, Julya Rabinowich, Nava Ebrahimi, Wladimir Kaminer, Olga Grjasnowa. Course grade is based on class work, reading journals, student projects, and a midterm. German 203 is recommended. English translations are available for most texts