About the Course
An introduction to the history, social background, culture, and literature of Asian America.
- Learn to close read a text and write critically, interestingly, and insightfully about it particularly through the lens of Asian American literature.
- Analyze the assumptions and presumptions about so-called ethnic literatures: that it is always in the realist mode, concerns itself with recounting historical events (immigration, discrimination, etc.), and is generally autobiographical.
- Discuss readings about questions of self and its performances, the vagaries of memory, the ethics of knowability, the ways in which sexualities are constructed and deployed.