“On the Universal Urgency of Immigrant Literature” by faculty member Christopher Castellani

On the Universal Urgency of Immigrant Literature

“There are only two possible stories,” goes the old adage, frequently attributed to John Gardner: “a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” It’s the sort of thing I’ve said casually to my students over the years as a way to help us organize our ideas, but it strikes me now that every immigrant story I know of falls into one or—in most cases, both—of those archetypes: a character leaves behind a place—a life, really: a home, a language, a personhood—to embark on a personal quest; or a character enters an unfamiliar country, where they are a stranger to most, and finds they must navigate its codes and culture in order to survive. The leaving behind is as much a theme in these stories as is the navigation, and the adventure is as much a loss as it is a journey of discoveries.

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