The Writer as Migrant (The Rice University Campbell Lectures)

ISBN: 0226399885

Author: Jin, Ha

Condition: New

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 Jins 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 authors 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 Jins mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.