The Writer as Migrant (The Rice University Campbell Lectures) - Softcover

Jin, Ha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226833836 ISBN 13: 9780226833835

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Ha Jin is the author of ten novels, four collections of short stories, and seven books of poetry. He is professor of English at Boston University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226833836
• ISBN 13: 9780226833835
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 106