The Idea of the Course

Welcome to "Migration Narratives" sections of ENGL 209: Novels and Tales.

Here are some of the central questions we'll be considering in this course:

• Migrations: What different kinds of migration are there? What are the causes of a given migration? What reasons do characters have for migrating? What issues arise during the process of migration? What consequences does a given migration have--for the migrants themselves, for those left behind, for those in the migrants' destination? What are the legacies of a given migration? What connections and contrasts can we draw between different kinds of migrations, and their causes, processes, and legacies?
• Narratives: What is the story about? What does the story invite its readers to contemplate? How is the story told? What does how it is told have to do with what is being told? What seems to be the narrator's or author's purpose in telling the story? What effect on the audience does the author seem to be trying to have? Just what kind of audience(s) does the author seem to be writing to or for?

Key Quotations

"The overweening, defining event of the modern world is the mass movement of raced populations, beginning with the largest forced transfer of people in the history of the world: slavery. The consequences of which transfer have determined all the wars following it as well as the current one's being waged on every continent. The contemporary world's work has become policing, halting, forming policy regarding, and trying to administer the movement of people. Nationhood--the very definition of citizenship--is constantly being demarcated and redemarcated in response to exiles, refugees, Gastarbeiter, immigrants, migrations, the displaced, the fleeing, the besieged. The anxiety of belonging is entombed within the central metaphors in the discourse of globalism, transnationalism, nationalism, the break-up of federations, the rescheduling of alliances, and the fictions of sovereignty." (Toni Morrison, "Home," in The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano [NY: Pantheon, 1997] 10)

ENGL 209: Novels and Tales, Fall 2001
Created: 9/18/01 2:20 pm
Last modified: 9/26/01 3:26 pm