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SoSe 21: Immigrant Literature

Florian Sedlmeier

Comments

The self-mythologization of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants has prompted a multi-faceted literary tradition of immigrant literature across the centuries. Starting in the late nineteenth century, the consolidation and reception of this massive corpus of texts increasingly corresponds to various sociological models and tropes such as Americanization, assimilation, and the melting pot. At the same time, cultural pluralism and multiculturalism provide alternative notions, which are partly informed by anthropology. The emphasis on ethnic difference questions the mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion, probing the conditions of participation in prototypical stories of acculturation and economic success. Conceived as a medium of cultural and social self-assurance, literature both affirms and destabilizes these models and tropes of immigration, which are often tied to familial narratives of generational change, where each new generation relates differently to the pressures of becoming American. Against this backdrop, the seminar examines autobiographical texts, samples from investigate journalism and social documentaries, dramatic and prose texts of varying lengths, and a graphic novel, covering a transhistorical scope that reaches from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Reading literature by Benjamin Franklin, Jacob Riis, Anzia Yezierska, Willa Cather, Jamaica Kincaid, Shaun Tan, and others, students will thus be familiarized with a variety of genres as well as the cultural, literary, and social plots central to narrating immigrant experiences. Students are expected to participate actively with regular contributions to class discussion. As a creative assignment, they are asked to collectively produce a multi-media text that revolves around immigration. For a graded “Schein,” they will have to write a term paper. close