Diaspora Narratives
Fall 2011
Shuli Chang
Course Description: This course examines problems and issues in contemporary literature in English,
specifically those produced by diasporic and migrant writers. Issues investigated in this course include the
problematic of home, formation of identity, reconfiguration of subjectivity, construction of memory,
constitution of alternative communities, and the ethics of the other. In particular, this course positions
these issues in the context of the global flow of population and desires and, by so doing, highlights the
significance of these issues in global diasporas.
Office Hours: Thursday: 13:00～15:00; Fridays: 10:00～11:00
Office: Hsiu-chi Building, Room 26612; 06-2757575 ext 52255
e-mail: zhuli@mail.ncku.edu.tw
Course Requirements: participation 10%; Presentations 20%; Short Paper: 25%; Final Paper: 45 %
Required Texts:
Braziel, Jana Evans & Anita Mannur, eds. Theorizing Diaspora. New York: Blackwell, 2003.
Toni Morrison, Beloved.
Zadie Smith, White Teeth.
Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus.
Eva Koffman, Lost in Translation.
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Presentation and Paper Guidelines (here I basically follow Prof. Cook’s example):
Mid-Term Paper: 3-4 pages in length for M.A. students
Dealing with at least one novel read in the course
Making use of at least two articles on the novel
Following MLA guidelines in matters of format and documentation
Term Paper:
6-8 pages in length for M.A. students
Dealing with one or more novels dealt with in the course
Making use of at least four articles on the novel
Following MLA guidelines in matters of format and documentation
Oral Reports:
20-30 minutes in length
Accompanied by a brief (2-3 page) outline
Presented in the student’s own words, not read from the article
Focusing on the central argument of the article, not incidental details
Concluding your presentation by raising questions that help launch off discussion
Uploading your presentation file to moodle afterwards
Tentative Syllabus (subject to revision):
Week Date Reading
1
9/14 Introduction
2
9/21 Diaspora Theories
3
9/28 Beloved
4
10/5
Beloved
5
10/12 Beloved
6
10/19 White Teeth
Criticism/Theory
Clifford & Friedman
Henderson
Morrison
Gordon
Gilroy
Hinson
Bhabha
Thompson
Bentley
Presenters
7
10/26 White Teeth
8
11/2
Moss
13
Dawson
Sell
11/9 Good-bye Columbus
Rudnytsky
Furman
11/16 Good-bye Columbus
Rabin
(Short Paper due on Wednesday) Aarons
11/23 Lost in Translation
Casteel
Fanetti
11/30 Lost in Translation
Fjellestad
Karpinski
12/7 Kavalier and Clay
Behlman
14
15
12/14 Kavalier and Clay
12/21 Kavalier and Clay
16
17
18
12/28 Term Paper presentations
1/4
Term Paper presentations
1/11 Term Paper due
9
10
11
12
White Teeth
Chute
Punday
Week 1 (9/14): Introduction: Diaspora Theories I: A Survey
Braziel, Jana Evans, & Anita Mannur, “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora
Studies.” Introduction, Theorizing Diaspora. Eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003. 1-22. (required)
Friedman, Susan Stanford, “Migration, Diaspora, and Borders” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages
and Literatures. Ed. David G. Nicholls. New York: MLA Publications, 2007. (required)
Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. 244-78.
Week 2 (9/21): Diaspora Theories II
Migrancy as Cultural Identity
Brah, Avtar, “Diaspora, Border, and Transnational Identities,” Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities.
London: Routlege, 1996. 178-21. (required)
Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeniety, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences,” Braziel and Mannur,
132-55.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Braziel and Mannur, 233-47.
Migrancy as Metaphor
Braidotti, Rosi.”Introduction: By Way of Nomadism.” Chapter 1. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 1-39.
Chambers, Iain. “An Impossible Homecoming” and “Migrant Landscapes,” Chapters 1 and 2, Migrancy,
Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994. 1-48. (required)
Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile” (1984). Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2002. 173-86.
Weeks 3-5 (9/28, 10/5, 10/12): Toni Morrison, Beloved
Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”
http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/morrison90.pdf
Mae G. Henderson, excerpt from A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory. Eds. Peter Brooker &
Peter Widdowson (London & New York; Prentice Hall, )
Homi Bhabha, excerpt from A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory.
Peter Nicholls, excerpt from A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory.
2
Avery Gordon, “Not Only the Footprints but the Water too and What is Down There” Ghostly Matters:
Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 137-190.
Hinson, D. Scott. “Narrative and Community Crisis in Beloved.” MELUS 26.4 (2001): 147Modernity and Diaspora
Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” Braziel and Mannur, 49-80.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. “The Limits of Cultural Translation,” Chapter 6, The Turbulence of Migration:
Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Oxford: Polity Press, 2000. 122-45. (required)
Weeks 6-8 (10/19; 10/26; 11/2): Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Beukema, Taryn. “Men Negotiating Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth,” Postcolonial Text 4.3 (2008): 1-15.
Childs, Peter. “Zadie Smith: Searching for the Inescapable.” Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970.
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. 201-16.
Dawson, Ashley. “Genetics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Race in Zadie Smith's White Teeth.” Mongrel
Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007.
Head, Dominic. “Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium.” Contemporary British
Fiction. Eds. Richard Lane, Rod Megham, Philip Tew. Cambridge: Polity P, 2003. 106-19.
---. “Towards Post-Nationalism.” The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002: 182-187.
Lassner, Phyllis. “‘Conclusion” Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 2004. 193-201.
Moss, Laura. "The Politics of Everyday Hybridity: Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Wasafiri 18.39 (2003). 11 Sep.
2010
Sell, Jonathan P.A. “Chance and Gesture in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and The Autograph Man: A Model for
Multicultural Identity?” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41.3 (2006): 27-44.
Thompson, Molly. “‘Happy Multicultural Land’? The Implications of an ‘excess of belonging’ in Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth.” Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Eds. Kadija
Sesay. Hertford, England: Hansib, 2005. 122-40.
Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Braziel and Mannur,
1-22.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Bodies on the Move: A Poetics of Home and Diaspora.” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 23.2 (Fall 2004): 189-212.
Week 9-10 (11/9, 11/16): Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus
Rudnytsky, Peter L. “Goodbye, Columbus: Roth’s Portrait of the Narcissist as a Young Man.” Twentieth-Century
Literature 51.1 (2005): 25-42.
Nilsen, Helge Normann. “On Love and Identity: Neil Klugman’s Quest in ‘Goodbye, Columbus.’” English
Studies 68 (1987): 79-88.
Rabin, Jessica G. “Still (Resonant, Relevant, Crazy) After All These Years: Goodbye Columbus and Five Short
Stories,” Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Westport, CT.:
Praeger, 2005. 9-24.
Felder, Leslie. “The Image of Newark and the Indignities of Love: Notes on Philip Roth.” The Collected
Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Vol. 2. New York: Stein and Day, 1971.
Furman, Andrew. “Immigrant Dreams and Civic Promises: (Con-)Testing Identity in Early Jewish
American Literature and Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land.” MELUS 25.1 (2000): 209-.
Aarons, Victoria. “Is It ‘good-for-the-jews or No-good-for-the-jews’?: Philip Roth's Registry of Jewish
Consciousness.” Shofar 19.1 (2000): 7Weeks 11-12 (11/23; 11/30): Eva Koffman, Lost in Translation
Casteel, Sarah Philips. “Eva Hoffman’s Double Emigration: Canada as a Site of Exile in Lost in
3
Translation,” Biography 24.1 (2001): 288-301.
Fanetti, Susan. “Translating Self into Liminal Space: Eva Hoffman’s Acculturation in/to a Postmodern
World,” Women’s Studies 34 (2005): 405-19.
Fjellestad, Danuta Zadworna. “‘The Insertion of the Self into the Space of Borderless Possibility’: Eva
Hoffman’s Exiled Body,” MELUS 20.2 (1995): 133-47.
Karpinski, Eva. “Negotiating the Self: Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation and the Question of Immigrant
Autobiography,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 28.1 (1996): 127-34.
Weeks 13-15 (12/7; 12/ 14; 12/21) Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Chute, Hillary. “Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the Framing of Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 54.2
(2008): 268-301.
Behlman, Lee. “The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish
American Holocaust Fiction.” Shofar 22.3 (2004): 56-71.
Punday, Daniel. “Kavalier & Clay, the Comic-Book Novel, and Authorship in a Corporate World.” Critique
49.3 (2008): 291-302.
Rover, Adam. “So Easily Assimilated: The New Immigrant Chic.” AJS Review 30.2 (2006): 313-24.
Week 16 (12/28): term-paper presentations
Weeks 17 (1/4): term-paper presentations
Week 18 (1/11): Term paper due
4