32212

SoSe 20: Lost and Found in Translation: Transatlantic Exile Literature

Tobias Alexander Jochum

Information for students

Please note that the first session will be on Tuesday, April 21, 2020.

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ONLINE COURSE. With the number of displaced people around the globe at an all-time high, the question of human mobility is rapidly becoming one of the defining political struggles of our young century. Taking this urgent reality as a starting point, this MA seminar examines literary narratives of exile and expulsion, focusing on migratory circuits around the Atlantic, while moving from the current historical juncture to the upheavals of the 20th century and back to the Middle Passage. Throughout these works, we find enclosure and stasis as prevailing master tropes, as the movement of bodies across geographies under colonial capitalism has been intimately linked to the proliferation of carceral regimes, designed to control and enclose. Beyond examining the lived histories of (forced) migration in their respective contexts, this course seeks to explore the alternative modes of writing that these experiences are bringing forth. The idea of language as home or site of belonging for the exiled writer—now disrupted and in flux—prompts us to consider "translation" in the dual sense of the word: a spatial transition from here to there as much as a crossing of linguistic barriers. The work of translation as we encounter it here is not only inherently political, but encompasses literary practices of collaboration, transcription, and re-writing, blurring the assumed separation between author and translator, while expanding the conventional frame of an American Studies syllabus. Primary readings (all in English) include works by Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, Anna Seghers and Jorge Luis Borges, Zora Neale Hurston and Dave Eggers, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Adichie, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. close