false 3651943 2 <DIV><DIV>As a teenager during China&#8217;s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People&#8217;s Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel <I>Waiting</I>, completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature. <BR> Ha Jin&#8217;s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world&#8212;questions that take center stage in <I>The Writer as Migrant</I>, his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin&#8217;s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov&#8212;who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing&#8212;are enlisted to explore a migrant author&#8217;s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie&#8212;refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration.<BR> Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin&#8217;s mental library, <I>The Writer as Migrant</I> is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.</DIV></DIV> 3695114 15 11 2008 The Writer as Migrant (Campbell Lectures) total:14|5:2|4:5|3:6|2:1|1:0| 14 50 46 3 3 0 false false Sat Oct 17 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 25 16:11:45 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 25 16:31:24 -0700 2009
In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual and the collective, and asks to what extent...more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Jun 09 10:16:19 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 09 10:32:03 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Nov 16 11:11:39 -0800 2008 Sun Nov 16 11:18:43 -0800 2008 more...]]> 0 0 false false Thu Nov 12 21:10:58 -0800 2009 Thu Nov 12 21:10:58 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Tue Nov 10 23:43:14 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 10 23:43:14 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Thu Oct 29 00:03:50 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 29 00:03:50 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Oct 08 13:07:00 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 08 13:07:02 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sat Sep 12 20:08:57 -0700 2009 Sat Sep 12 20:08:57 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Mon Sep 07 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Sep 10 16:57:39 -0700 2009 Thu Sep 10 16:57:54 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Sep 10 11:15:04 -0700 2009 Thu Sep 10 11:15:04 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Wed Sep 09 21:55:01 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 09 21:53:14 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 09 21:56:52 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sat Aug 29 23:10:59 -0700 2009 Sat Aug 29 23:24:53 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Fri Sep 18 03:33:41 -0700 2009 Sat Aug 08 17:15:09 -0700 2009 Sat Sep 19 14:08:47 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Jul 23 08:32:11 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 23 08:32:11 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Tue Jul 21 16:00:36 -0700 2009 Tue Jul 21 16:00:39 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Fri Jul 17 18:52:33 -0700 2009 Fri Jul 17 18:52:33 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Tue Jul 14 11:22:24 -0700 2009 Tue Jul 14 11:22:24 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Jun 25 20:27:28 -0700 2009 Thu Jun 25 20:27:28 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Tue Jun 02 02:44:38 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 02 02:44:38 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Tue May 26 15:21:53 -0700 2009 Tue May 26 15:21:53 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=3651943