Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

AMERIKANISCHE LITERATUR
Vorlesung
--- --- Freitag
U.S. Ethnic Literatures, 3 CP
2 st. mo 14-16 HGB 10
(vgl. Vorl.-Nr. 050 645)
Ethnic literatures have long been neglected in the U.S. literary canon. Yet slowly but
steadily texts written by Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans,
and Asian Americans have been recognized: published in big publishing houses,
reviewed on the pages of the New York Times Book Review, and added to the
reading lists of schools and colleges. While this attention often tends to focus only on
the ethnic difference, the lecture will introduce ethnic texts as interventions in and
interactions with the traditional canon of US literature.
Text: Heath Anthology II
LN: attendance, written test
Seminar
050 693 Reed
Migration and the Global Horizon of Contemporary American Fiction, 5 CP
2 st. mi 16-18 GB 5/39 Nord
In 2008, the USA elected as its president Barack Obama, the son of a man from
Kenya. This event is a reminder that the American self-image as a “land of
opportunity” and a “nation of immigrants” still has genuine political force and popular
appeal. Of course, “immigration” today hardly means what it did back in 1886, when
the Statue of Liberty first announced to the world the USA’s intention to take in the
world’s “poor,” “tired,” “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Technological
advances—cell phones, the internet, GPS—and changing sociopolitical realities—the
end of the Cold War, the advent of fully globalized capitalism, the war on terror—
have transformed Americans’ sense of themselves and their place in the world. In