ENGL485-01, Senior Seminar: Transnational Literature and Film, Fall 2012

Abstract

Literary and film studies have long been dominated by nationalist paradigms, but these fields have been reinvigorated by their engagement with transnationalism in the last two decades. Transnationalism enables us to challenge fixed, Eurocentric assumptions about personal and cultural identities and consider constructions occurring between real and imagined boundaries. In this senior seminar, we will assess the recent transnational turn in literary and film studies. Drawing on the transnational approach, we will examine texts that explore the impact of migration, diaspora, and globalization and their intersections with issues of race, gender and sexuality, nationality, and liminality. Our literary and cinematic texts will allow us to complicate fictions of racial and cultural purity; consider how people, products, and discourses circulate; and explore the thorny nexus between the local, national, and global in a transnational world.