Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Writing Outside the Nation

Writing Outside the Nation

Seyhan, Azade

Paperback

Series: Translation/Transnation, Book 1

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0691050996
ISBN13: 9780691050997
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Dec 24 2000
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.08 Depth: 9.22
Language: English

Some of the most innovative writers of contemporary literature are writing in diaspora in their second or third language. Here Azade Seyhan describes the domain of transnational poetics they inhabit. She begins by examining the works of selected bilingual and bicultural writers of the United States (including Oscar Hijuelos, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eva Hoffman) and Germany (Libuse Moníková, Rafik Schami, and E. S. Özdamar, among others), developing a new framework for understanding the relationship between displacement, memory, and language. Considering themes of loss, witness, translation, identity, and exclusion, Seyhan interprets diasporic literatures as condensed archives of cultural and linguistic memory that give integrity and coherence to pasts ruptured by migration.

The book next compares works by contemporary Chicana and Turkish-German women writers as innovative and sovereign literary voices within the larger national cultures of the United States and Germany. Seyhan identifies in American multiculturalism critical clues for analyzing new cultural formations in Europe and maintains that Germany's cultural transformation suggests new ways of reading the American literary mosaic. Her approach, however, extends well beyond these two literatures. She creates a critical map of a third geography, where a transnational, multilingual literary movement is gathering momentum.


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