Introduction to Asian American Literature (5): An historically-structured survey course. Texts include: Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, John Okada’s No-No Boy, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. (next offered: Winter 2024)
Please note regarding AsAm 5: GOLD may indicate that space remains in some sections, but courses are full when *lecture* is full. No overriding add codes will be available until the second week of classes.
Viet American Experience (100EE): A course looking at the production of historical and cultural narratives about Vietnamese American experience. What debates do second-generation Viet Americans navigate, and how do they choose the stories they themselves tell?
Asian American Fiction (122): On the Asian American detective story… sorta. We’ll read mystery fiction as a genre—with some stories that are overtly mysteries, others not. We’ll also address a set of questions that collectively these books keep coming back to over time: questions about ethnic community and (interracial) violence. Texts include: Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables, Nina Revoyr’s Southland, Suki Kim’s The Interpeter, and Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay. (next offered: Winter 2024)
Comparative Ethnic American Literature (124): This course, nicknamed “dating in rape culture,” reads literature alongside film and other media on the themes of beauty and romance, through gender and race. It will emphasize the “culture” in rape culture. That is, rather than dwell on the moments or hours just before or during an act of sexual violation, our concern will be the lifetimes of gender training, subject formation, and cultural norms of romance or attraction that form its conditions of possibility. Texts include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sigrid Nunez’ A Feather on the Breath of God, and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.
Asian American Women’s Literature (128): A literary meditation on sexual violence in wartime. The novels we’ll read will span the globe—certainly collectively, but often even within a single narrative. By course’s end, however, we come back home: to California, and college campuses, because #WeToo. Texts include: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet, and Chanel Miller’s Know My Name.
Asian American Mental Health (162): A humanities-based and ethnic/gender studies approach to mental health.
Asian American Academic Rhetoric (182): A workshop devoted to honing academic writing skills. Designed for the upper-division student who has already mastered the mechanics of argumentative essay writing, as offered by the Writing Program, and who would write with professional polish. Students will engage each week in critiquing published scholarly work, editing journalistic copy submitted for publication, or workshopping each other’s writing intensively. By quarter’s end, students shall develop a keen editor’s eye, able to recognize and hopefully to produce academic prose that is rigorous: precise, concise, clear.
