Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores the culture of peoples and individuals displaced by force or migrating by choice. May focus on the plight of refugees in the work of playwrights, essayists and novelists, on the work of emigre artists in different cultural traditions, or on a comparison of the literary cultures of exiles and emigres. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course will focus on exile more than on emigration. “Exile” can be self-imposed but most often it implies banishment, deportation or homelessness and signifies that the exile is a prisoner, refugee or outcast. While exile is sometimes considered as Byronic or “rakishly romantic”-- most often by those who are not themselves exiles -- in this course exile will be viewed as a spiritual, psychological and spatial trauma, which does not mean that it cannot also be a source of enlightenment or even joy.  

Exile and eventual homecoming are at the root of the western monotheistic tradition, so the first part of this course will survey some of the key texts that establish the profound preoccupation with exile in the west and then show how the sense of exile is manifested more recently in the genre of the Negro Spiritual song. We then shift to the Vietnamese classic, The Tale of Kieu, and its subtext of Confucian and Buddhist struggle. The second half of the course will concentrate on texts dealing with literary depictions of exile in the modern world: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of internal exile in the Soviet Union, Eileen Chang’s forboding sketches of physical and psychological homelessness, and Ghassan Kanafani’s account of the effects of deportation from Palestine/Israel.  

Generically, the course will span religious prose, epic poetry, song, film, prose autobiography, novel and the short story. Students are expected to attend class, write a blog on the readings, do a take-home midterm exam and compose a final paper in addition to making oral presentations and, crucially, engaging in class discussion.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Required texts: Students are strongly advised to purchase these texts in advance from a reputable bookseller. Prices quoted below are from Chapters-Indigo, except for Kanafani which is from Amazon.ca. The SFU Bookstore will probably not carry these books.

REQUIRED READING: