Translation, Migration, & Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, & the Transpacific
5-8 Jul 2017 Bordeaux (France)

Participants > Panelists > Šesnić Jelena

Towards a new, post-immigrant and post-ethnic U.S. American women's fiction
Jelena Šesnić  1  
1 : University of Zagreb

The title of my presentation is meant to address a new orientation apparently more and more observable in American fiction from the turn of the millennium. Considered from the point of view of authors, there is a steadily rising trend of immigrant, second-generation or EFL writers that nevertheless make a contribution to American literature, or, should we say, on cue from Caren Irr, that create a new geopolitics of literature and pry open the notion of a nationally bounded literary canon. While these processes are underway in many contemporary increasingly multicultural Western societies, they are particularly alive in contemporary U.S. women's fiction where a number of women's writers have joined the fray. For the purposes of illustrating how the latest wave of multicultural women writers shape not only American but also global Anglophone literature, I will revert to the examples of Bharati Mukherjee, and her early articulation of her immigrant position (both in her selected fiction and other writings) and Jhumpa Lahiri. I believe that the juxtaposition of these two authors might provide fruitful points of comparison and difference, and thus indicate some broader trends in post-ethnic U.S. women's fiction.


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