• ISBN13: 9780226399881
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publisher Imprint: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: October 21, 2008
• Pages: 112
• Original Price: USD 14.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 273 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): American / Asian American & Pacific Islander

National Book Award winner Ha Jin raises questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world.

Consisting of three interconnected essays, The Writer as Migrant sets Ha Jin'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 their birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov--who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing--are enlisted to explore a migrant author'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--refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration.

Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin's mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

Jin, Ha: - Ha Jin is the author of ten novels, four collections of short stories, and seven books of poetry. He is professor of English at Boston University.