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Texts
Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart
Susan Choi, The Foreign Student
Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger
Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
John Okada, No-no Boy
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Course
Description
This course is designed to introduce you to the diversity
and richness of Asian American texts, which link America to Asia through
literary ties as well as emotional bonds. We will read "classic"
works such as Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, an
autobiographical account of his experiences as an immigrant and as a
migrant worker, and John Okada's No-no Boy, a novel about the
experiences of Japanese American families during the WWII period. We
will also read the work of younger writers who have just started publishing
in the last few years, such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Susan Choi, and Lan Samantha
Chang, the new director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who all continue
to write about new immigrants from Asia and their struggle to become
American-- but in voices more contemporary with our own.
In our class discussions, we will attempt to make connections between
the various texts by considering topics such as family relationships,
personal identity, racial stereotypes, cultural differences, gender
politics, and other themes that you discover in the readings.
This course fulfills the General Education Race and Ethnicity requirement
(C4).
Learning Objectives
By the end of the semester, you should be able to:
- "see" various cultures through their literature
- develop your own interpretation of Asian American works within the
context of American literary history
- make thematic connections between Asian American texts and texts
in the more familiar literary "canon"
- articulate your readings and the connections that you make between
texts with clarity and persuasiveness
- continue to explore new texts on your own-- with confidence and
pleasure
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