ENGL1712 · Complex Problems and Enduring Questions

Roots and Routes: Reading Identity, Migration, and Culture

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

This is an Enduring Question course and is open to FRESHMEN only. You must take ENGL1713 with this course. How does migration in today's world shape questions of identity, borders, and belonging and lead to a reimagining of home? In these paired courses, students will read a range of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (including spoken word poems) by authors whose migration stories to the United States offer multiple ways to think about what it means to be an outsider and build a new life and home. They will explore their own migration stories, the routes that brought them here, and the ways in which their family roots shape their identities. Some of the questions students will consider include: What are the gifts and challenges of making a home across cultures? Of being multilingual? What do you know, and what don't you know, about your own family's migration story, whether recent or more removed? How might that story intersect with the topics we encounter in our texts? How does the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk on the danger of the single story invite us to ask questions about power, memory, silence, and voice? What does it mean to migrate in a globalized, wired, yet often divided world? Reflection sessions will include an author talk, a museum visit, creative writing, and several shared meals.