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ENGL BC3920 Senior Seminar: Migration, Immigration, and the Borders of American Literature. 4 points.

Not offered during 2022-23 academic year.

This course will explore representations of voluntary and forced migration as a path toward understanding the formation of literary traditions and histories in the US and the Americas. How do we think about immigrant literature if the immigrant was here before the literature? Where does American literature begin and end if a mobile subject carries her words across borders and genres?  In addition to reading fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural literacy and migration by writers like Frederick Douglass, Julia Alvarez, and Valeria Luiselli, we’ll examine the ways in which contemporary discourses of relocation generate surprising returns to what we might recognize as the proto-exceptionalist and/or post-apocalyptic foundations of American literature and culture.