English 233 - Fall, 2011

Problems in American Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Jerng, Mark
CRN: 62614
Time: M 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later American
Focus: Genre, Method, Theory

Description

Topic: What is Ethnic Literature?

Throughout its history as an object of study, the category of ethnic literature has evoked a broad array of questions: what the relationship is between symbolic capital and political capital; how to negotiate competing values of social, aesthetic, and political value in the construction of an identity-based literary canon; what are the methodologies appropriate to ethnic literary criticism, and what are its theoretical presuppositions. Most foundationally, perhaps: what is the relationship between the sociohistorical significance of race and the reading of racial significance in literature? This seminar will focus specifically on the canon-formation and debates within African American and Asian American literary studies, because their respective vexed relationships to the significance of race reveal important similarities and marked differences. We will start off by reading foundational debates in the formation of African American and Asian American literary studies and the theories of racial formation and signification that underlie the institution of ethnic literatures. We then examine the types of reading strategies and debates that the study of these two literary traditions has historically naturalized. Finally, we will take up theorizations of genre, aesthetics, race, and readerly cognition in order both to consider what might have been missed by earlier undertheorized presuppositions of ethnic literary studies and to forge possible new agendas for the future. Within this re-examination of the protocols of race that underlie the reading and formation of African American and Asian American literature, we will read novels, novellas, and poems that were often marginal within the construction of these canons, paying specific attention to their reception histories and readers’ critical frameworks. Primary works will be supplemented by readings drawn from Henry Louis Gates, Claudia Tate, Kenneth Warren, Elizabeth Abel, Toni Morrison, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Colleen Lye, Sui Sin Far, John Guillory, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Mark Chiang, Kandice Chuh, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Moran, Hans Robert Jauss, and Samuel Delany.

Grading

Class Participation
Oral Presentation
15-20 page article-length paper

Texts

A Japanese Nightingale (1903), Onoto Watanna (Winifred Eaton)
Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), W.E.B. DuBois
"Talma Gordon" (1900), Pauline Hopkins
The Silent Traveller Series (excerpts), Chiang Yee
Imitation of Life (1933), Fannie Hurst
"Limitations of Life" (1938), Langston Hughes
East Goes West (1937), Younghill Kang
The Foxes of Yarrow (1946), Frank Yerby
Kingsblood Royal (1947), Sinclair Lewis
"Recitatif", Toni Morrison
A Savage Holiday (1954), Richard Wright
The Country Place (1947), Ann Petry