120077 SE Literary Seminar / BA-Arbeit / MA British/Irish/New English (2010S)

Contents: The seminar will explore varieties of cross-cultural encounters and experiences of immigrants to England, America, Britain and other countries from within the English-Speaking World as presented on selected works of fiction by a wide variety of anglophone authors, written between the mid-20th and the present. The texts discussed deal with narratives of cross-cultural connection, collision, alienation from the immigrant's native roots, social isolation as well as re-assertion of ethnic and/or cultural difference. The texts include Colm Toibin's latest novel "Brooklyn" (2009) and several short stories e.g. by the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, the Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro, the American fiction writer T. C. Boyle, the Irish novelists Roddy Doyle and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and the Iranian born British-Rhodesian Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing as well as narratives by Australian Aboriginal writers.