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ENGL 235: |
Studies in American Literature
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Comparative Race Readings US Indigenous and Asian Pacific Islander Literatures: Space, Memory |
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| Winter 2008 |
| Instructor: Shirley Geok-Lin Lim |
| Meets on: T 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM SH 2716 |
| Prerequisites: Graduate standing |
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Content of the course will vary from quarter to quarter and these courses may be repeated for credit with consent of the chair of the departmental graduate committee.
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The seminar examines 20th century U.S. indigenous and Asian Pacific Islander
(API) literatures on the relationships between space and memory as
articulated in paired readings of selected prose narratives. How do American
Indian and Asian immigrant literatures, beginning with the early part of the
century, address and figure the inter-animating concepts of
space/land/territory and the (racialized) subject as they relate to memory,
community (gendered, classed), history, and social forces of
nation-formation? We will track representations of settlement, wilderness,
liminal identities, desire, violence, stories of genesis and genocide, and
other obsessing topoi in selected texts. The seminar will include indigenous
and Asian American imaginations imbricated in globalizing forces and
movements. Paying attention to genre and narrative structure, the readings
will engage with the formal and stylistic strategies deployed in these
texts. The texts are selected to illustrate the diversity of both American
Indian Nations and Asian Pacific Islander (API) communities and the range of
their literary achievements. The seminar will also be structured in a
triangulated fashion with reference to texts that provide an entry into
these works at a theoretical and critical level: texts that offer ways to
think about subject identity-formation, decolonization, genre dynamics,
historicist approaches, and comparative race concepts.
Texts:
Course Reader
DčArcy McNickle, The Surrounded and John Okada, No-No Boy
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain and Maxine Hong Kingston, China
Men
Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer and Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart
Louis Erdrich, Tracks and Joy Kogawa, Obasan
Karen Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Leslie Marmon Silko,
Almanac of the Dead |
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