231147 Immigrant Mother and (U.S.) American Daughter (S) (WiSe 2013/2014)

A phenomenon called ‘Americanization’ has penetrated many types of literature, art and the (new) media ever since the existence of immigration itself. Likewise, the topic of the ‘mother-daughter relationship’ seems to be a recurrent social theme in literature – fiction and non-fiction – until today. Both issues are united by an immense mutual influence that calls for a closer look at the dynamics that take place in the U.S. American literary and social context as to understand how they cohere.
What also unites the topics mentioned is that their presence in our daily lives has not ceased either. Popular TV series are built entirely upon the relationship of a mother to her daughter as we can see in "Gilmore Girls", for instance. In this example the two main characters – mother and daughter – are not the only couple that displays the complex dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship. A Korean-American friend of the family also establishes an insight into the close relationship to her “so-very-different”, “so-very-Korean” mother.
Thirty years earlier, in the famous novel "The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston, the mother-daughter relationship acquires a mixture of melancholy and national myth hardly to be found in any other novel of that time.
In “New York Day Women”, a short story from Edwidge Danticat’s story collection Krik? Krak! (1995), a Haitian-American mother-daughter relationship is built upon the search for understanding each other’s daily lives.

As these three examples indicate, the aim of this course is to investigate how these relationships are exactly affected by ‘immigration’ and (supposed) ‘Americanization’. Here, different (sub-)cultural values merge that influence the child’s education, emotional well-being, health, work and own sense of a family (amongst many other factors). Thus, psychological, sociological, post-colonial, postmodernist and feminist approaches seem to call for an interdisciplinary investigation of this part of ‘ethnic literatures’ in order to expose structures of the phenomenon.