Course description
Course description
The MA Cultures of Migration, Diaspora and Exile pathway provides students with a first degree in a modern European language or languages or in a related humanities discipline, with an in-depth knowledge of the culture, literature and cultural history arising from the historical and social processes of collective population movement and individual displacement. Some options explore economic migration experiences, exile writing, travel literature, or diaspora and refugee displacement through war and violence. These thematic issues are approached through a range of historically and regionally specific examples of migrant or diaspora culture (eg Islam in Spain, Turkish writers in Germany, Mexico and the USA, Portuguese Africa, Jewish culture in Germany), by way of focusing on a common core of theoretical concerns. These will include: language and identity, race and hybridity, the impact of globalisation and transnationalism, the gendered construction of nationhood, the significance of cultural memory and effects of trauma and shifting definitions of imagined community as mediated by culture. The MA also provides a thorough grounding in critical theoretical approaches to literary and cultural studies, and makes students conversant with the methods of scholarly research in the humanities and with the resources necessary for that research.
Module details
Compulsory course units include: Critical Theory and Research Methods. Optional course units available typically include:
-Turkish Women's Writing in German: Emine Sevgi Özdamar
-Trauma and Memory in 20 th Century French Life Writing
-Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary French Cinema
-Jewish Culture in the German Speaking context
-Border Crossings: Comparative Cultures of Diaspora
-Sex, Lies and Rhetorics: The Book of Celestina
-Writing Diaspora/Imagining Nation: Portuguese Migrant Literature
-In and Out of Africa: Portuguese Post/colonial Writing
-African Women's Writing in Portuguese
-In or Out? Inclusion and Exclusion on Old French Narrative
-Issues and Approaches in Transcultural Studies: Society, Culture and Postcoloniality
-Spanish American Literature
-New German Identities: Turkish-German Culture
-Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory
-Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences: Theory and Historiography
-Time, Language and the Other in Modern Jewish Philosophy
-The `Jewish Question' in Modern Europe
