Students will gain insight into the complex meaning and function of both home and abroad in the fiction of American expatriate writers. They will also gain an understanding of the central role of expatriation for American literary history.

Short lecture inputs and class discussions covering the assigned texts.Contextualised shared interpretation of selected text passages.

This seminar explores literature produced by American expatriate writers from Henry James to the present. We will discuss why so many American artists and intellectuals were attracted to Europe during the 19th and first half of the 20th century and how their love affair with European capitals such as Paris, London, and Rome changed over time. Among the texts we will discuss are Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” (1899), Henry James's Daisy Miller (1879), Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1925), and William Gardner Smith's The Stone Face (1963). We will conclude the semester with fiction set in non-European countries, reading short stories by Pearl S. Buck and Paul Bowles as well as Paul Theroux's novel Mosquito Coast (1982), and discuss how their depictions of American encounters with foreign people and places differs from those set in European locales.

Henry James. Daisy Miller. Any edition.Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises. Any edition.Paul Theroux. Mosquito Coast. Any edition.All other relevant literature will be made available on Moodle. Students are expected to own or have access to at least a copy of all assigned texts. 

Class participation, response paper (1,500 words), term paper (4000-4500 words) 

Texts covered in class (both historical/theoretical and primary texts). Students can freely choose the topic of their final paper within the framework of the class topic.

Quantity and quality of task fulfillment; quantity and quality of theoretical literature used; choice of primary text, quality of analysis, and quality of application of theoretical concepts and terminology. The final grade is an aggregate of 30% participation; 20% response paper, 50% term paper. The use of AI support or AI-generated text/content is prohibited in all of my courses!In order to check whether this ban is respected, there is the possibility of a compulsory, individual, oral or written follow-up defence of any submitted or presented work. Should the use of AI be detected in any assignment and a follow-up defence not be sufficient, the task concerned will automatically receive a fail-grade and your violation will be reported to university leadership.Plagiarism consists of intentionally misrepresenting someone else's work, words, or insights as your own and counts as a serious offense in an academic community. All instances of plagiarism, regardless of their extent, will also result in an automatic fail grade for the entire class.