Course Description

Migration into America might well be the most explosive political issue in the 2024 elections.  And migration into Europe, largely from Africa, has been a source of radical change for over a decade.  But, of course, it is not just the contemporary world that has been marked by large movements of people.  Slaves, exiles, immigrants, and refugees have moved their homes, and sometimes told their stories, for millennia.  In this course we will consider fiction about the experience of movement across borders, some involving coming to America, and others taking place in other parts of the world.  So you will be learning about both history and literature, and thinking about and writing about how those two things connect.  We will read excerpts from The Penguin Book of Migration Literature; My Antoniá, by Willa Cather; The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead; Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin; Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera; How Much of these Hills is Gold, by C. Pam Zhang; Homegoing, by Yaa Ygasi; and Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid.  Some of these books are from the western worlds of Europe and America, and others are from the developing world. 

Another important part of English 2100 is to become familiar with a range of critical and theoretical approaches scholars might use to analyze a text. We always start with our own reaction to a story or book or poem, but really it’s impossible not to bring a certain “critical lens” into that process, and we will be thinking about how that works. Some critics emphasize form, others race, others gender, others history—we tend to mix and match.  By comparing several theoretical approaches (such as New Criticism, feminism, postcolonial criticism, African American criticism and LGBTQ criticism) you will be able to see how your view of a text depends on the questions you ask about it. We will emphasize these options in our reading of contextual texts for our first novel, My Antonia, which is why there is a required edition for this text. 

Over the course of the semester, you will write a short paper for six of the shared texts, experimenting with different critical perspectives.  As a final project you will do more individual research, looking into a different migration—no one course can come near discussing them all!—and writing about that migration’s representation in literature. Your final project will allow you to go in your own direction, both in terms of subject—you will pick a migration narrative that we have not read together—and in terms of what critical approach and what research you want to employ. 

In addition to increasing your comfort with and pleasure in writing about literature, the goals of this course include a richer understanding of some of the patterns of migration into or within this country, in the context of similar patterns in other places and times.  These are truly amazing stories. 

This section is for English majors only.  Please contact advisor Mary Moore for consent.