Literature, Culture and Society

Course content

Examines the literature of Turkish diasporic communities in Germany in its historical, social, political and cultural context. Focuses on the literature that emerges out of the experience of being marginalized as a ‘foreigner’ or ‘guest’, experience of Turkish immigrants. Examine how a variety of concerns represented in these writings such as the question of determining what is one’s “own” culture, tensions of defining a non-German self, cultural differences, the role of language in establishing identity in an “alien” culture, the loss of mother tongue, assimilation and alienation, cultural signs of hybridity, loss of the past, longing for home in displacement.