English 172ld. The Literature of Displacement

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: Sever 103
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A displacement can take place in our lives in the sense of moving, or being moved, from one location to another. From the nautical sense we also understand any volume, which fills or occupies a liquid space that changes to accommodate it, a useful metaphor for intellectual displacements—as we bend, shift and make room for new ideas in our minds. In psychology, a displacement is the transference of a site of trauma from one person, scenario, or object to another. Finally, there are histories of human displacement, a broad category under which to consider narratives generated by migration, emigration, exile, and enslavement. In this seminar we will read from texts that contribute in all of these ways, often interrelated, to a “literature of displacement.” We will read novels, essays, and memoirs by Joseph Conrad, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Baldwin, Tayeb Salih, Valeria Luiselli, and W.G. Sebald and watch films by Les Blank, Charles Burnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Edward Yang among others. We will ask how these works respond to the trials and rewards of belonging to, or being alienated from, cultures and communities; how history and loss imprint us with identity but also disrupt it; what we learn from encountering other places and perspectives. Can remembering, witnessing, and storytelling create a place for ourselves in a world founded on an ongoing and massive experience of perpetual displacement?

Class Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Department of English Migrations requirement.