Courses

As a survey of Asian American literature, this course examines recurring cycles of love and fear in Asian North American relations from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The course has four learning objectives.

First, by the end of the term, you should be able to recognize and explain key aspects of Asian North American cultural and literary representations across the twentieth century.

We will first turn to what became known as “yellow peril,” one effect of exclusion laws that monitored the entrance of Asians into the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the corresponding phenomenon of Orientalism, the fascination with a binary of Asia and the West. We’ll examine how Asian North American authors respond to later cycles of love and fear, ranging from the forgetting of Japanese internment in North America and the occupation of the Philippines.

The second section turns to how Asian North American authors use innovative creative strategies to resist cycles of love and fear, especially in the wake of war and conflict in Asia and alongside the rise of the model minority.

The final section examines intimacy, communities, and crisis in forms of migration, diaspora, and globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the global refugee crisis to more recent developments in the wake of COVID-19.

Second, you will interpret literary strategies (what literary scholars call “formal strategies”) and their connection to the text’s argument.

A central claim for this course is that cultural productions make debatable claims and arguments, and that one of the ways they do so is through form (such as the brevity of a poetic line and its layout, different narrators or points of view in a novel, or a drama that moves back and forth in time). How do these authors use literature to respond to, critique, or revise cultural representations of Asia and Asians in America? You will learn how to unpack the argument of text, or, more precisely, what you define as the argument of each work. What cultural issue or problem does the text identify? Why? What is its argument regarding this issue? How does the work support this argument? Does it offer any solutions? If so, what are they? If not, why not?

To that end, we will consider all of these texts might be responding to, commenting on, and even working against dominant cultural assumptions of their time and in ours. Although we will read the texts in rough chronological order, at times, we will break chronology to examine the texts in comparative, thematic clusters.

Third, you will create original and informed analyses of literary works and fine-tune and evaluate your critical reading and writing skills.

You’ll have the opportunity to practice analysis in multiple ways. In your assignments and assessments for the course, you will a) formulate your own arguments about the texts, b) support these arguments with evidence and analysis and c) situate your analyses amid relevant historical and cultural contexts.

Finally, you will reflect upon a) connections between course material and the contemporary world and b) the potential of humanities studies as a method of community and social engagement.

Ideally, you will leave this course with tools and strategies that you will be able to use beyond the boundaries of a course in literary study: thinking critically, analyzing evidence carefully, developing original and creative opinions and arguments, and communicating effectively.