Seminar Transcultural Life Writing Living in Translation Mo 10:30h

In the seminar we will discuss various forms of transcultural life writing (e.g. Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) and relate them to the concept of translation. Transcultural life writing designates all those autobiographical texts that model the life stories of subjects who live in the space between various cultures. Trying to establish a sense of belonging under frequently hostile conditions, these nomadic, diasporic and migratory subjects typically live in translation' and are thus faced with the challenge of mediating between various cultural traditions and practices. As a threshold genre (Döring 2008, 69) that consistently crosses the boundaries between fact and fiction, memory and history, selves and others (ibid.), life writing seems to provide an ideal site for exploring the sense of in-between-ness, liminality and dislocation that often circumscribes postcolonial subject-positions. The constitution of postcolonial subject positions in an in-between space typically disrupts totalizing forms of subjectivity as, e.g., promoted by many Western autobiographies, and validates alternative notions of a non-unitary self, bearing the traces of multiple belongings. The seminar therefore opens a larger perspective in which to conceive the ongoing literary configuration of alternate modes of subjectivity as an attempt to work through the formative impact of imposed cultural traditions and the frequently coercive dimensions of global media cultures. Suggested Introductory Reading:   Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. New York/London: Routledge, 2001. Baena, Rosalia. Transculturing Auto/biography: Forms of Life Writing. London: Routledge, 2007. Bassnett, Susan. Translation, The New Critical Idiom. Abington, UK: Routledge, 2014. Döring, Tobias. Postcolonial Literatures in English. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008. Huddart, David. Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2008. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009.    A detailed bibliography will be made available at the beginning of the seminar. Englisch (MA, PO 2013) Universität Düsseldorf WiSe 2016/17 Univ.-Prof. Dr. Neumann Birgit