Block: tba (between June, 6- July, 15)
The refugee’s flight has been a recurrent theme in literature at least since Virgil’s depiction of Aeneas escaping Troy in the Aeneid. As in Aeneas’s experience, the refugee is compelled by catastrophic events to undertake a journey which is at once physical and existential. The flight from “home” to a sought-after space of refuge necessarily entails psychological transformation which is potentially as momentous as the physical journey of escape. While flight from immediate danger and “arrival” in a safe haven may remove the explicit threat of harm, the journey of social and psychological adjustment is fraught with conflicting measures of peril and hope. Transformed in the process is more than the individual refugee. The refugee’s experience also reverberates with social and political implications extending from “home” to the place of hoped-for refuge.
Canadian literature has long reflected and been shaped by refugee experience, albeit frequently subsumed within representation of a more amorphous immigrant experience. More recent world-historical events, however, have thrust the issue of refugees to the forefront of socio-political and literary consideration. This course proposes a wide-ranging treatment of refugee experience on the basis of selected contemporary novels from Canada. Our concern will be with assessing universal traits of the refugee experience – impressions that Aeneas would recognize – while honouring the specificity – personal and socio-historic – of individual refugee experience. As a subsidiary issue, we will also consider the ways in which Canadian society is depicted from the perspective of refugees.
The course will be conducted as a block seminar.
Tentative List of Required Reading:
Selected Poems and Short Stories (provided by the instructor)
Hill, Lawrence, The Illegal, 2015
Jamal, Tasneem, Where the Air is Sweet, 2014
Nasrallah, Dmitri, Blackbodying, 2004
Thien, Madeleine, Dogs at the Perimeter, 2011
N.B. Course Requirements: Presentation on a text of the student’s choice |
