Veranstaltungen HS 2015 (14.09.2015 - 18.12.2015)
Seminar für BA- und MA-Studierende
Das wöchentliche Seminar findet jeweils mittwochs statt!
Freie Plätze werden auch an andere Interessierte vergeben.
Explosive Transformation: Globalisation and its Discontents in Asian Fiction
This seminar will explore, via the novels and short stories of some outstanding Asian writers, the impact of globalisation – that amorphous term for our worldwide system of merging economies, industries, markets, mass migrations, and cultures – on individual and collective lives across Asia and beyond. Characterised by one novelist as an “explosive transformation,” the repercussions of global capitalism are nowhere more explosive or transformative than throughout the nexus of economies spanning China and India, the region’s superpowers, and the many fast developing Southeast Asian nations in between. And nowhere are the human consequences of this profound transformation more convincingly construed than in the fictional works of prominent contemporary Asian writers, the literary descendants of Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, and other moral appraisers of Western capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our seminar will focus on close interpretive readings and discussions on form, craft and language in the selected fictional works, especially as they relate to the backdrop of globalisation in the landscapes and lives depicted.
Wendy Law-Yone is a Burmese-born novelist whose books have been translated into many languages, while her short stories, book reviews, and articles have appeared in international anthologies, periodicals, and newspapers like The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Architectural Digest. Her novels have been on the curriculum of literature, history and Asian Studies courses in universities throughout Europe and the United States. Irrawaddy Tango was nominated for the 1994 Irish Times International Fiction Prize. The Road to Wanting was longlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize. International awards for her writing include a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Award for Creative Writing, a Harvard Foundation Award for International Literary Arts and Intercultural Relations, and a David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of East Anglia. Banned in Burma for more than two decades, the first of Wendy Law-Yone’s books to be translated into Burmese – her recent memoir, Golden Parasol – was an instant bestseller.
