Writer As Migrant

Novelist Ha Jin raises questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world.

Consisting of three interconnected essays, The Writer as Migrant sets Ha Jin's own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of their birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov-who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing-are enlisted to explore a migrant author's conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie-refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration.

Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin's mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

Product details

• Authors: Ha Jin
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.02.2024
• EAN: 9780226833835
• ISBN: 978-0-226-83383-5
• No. of pages: 112
• Series: The Rice University Campbell Lectures
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, Migration, immigration & emigration, Migration, immigration and emigration, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Relating to migrant groups / diaspora communities or peoples, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form