37 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
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# Week 1
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## Lecture 1 (9/30)
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- Ralph Ellison: novel bound up with nationhood
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- What/who are we?
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- What has been the experience of this particular group?
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- How did it become this way?
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- What stops us from attaining the ideal?
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- American writers + artists always return to question of our national
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collectivity -> successes / failures
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- American flag is abstraction + symbol
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- Same painting, over and over again, different meaning/symbol
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- w/ rise of democracy in US, slavery happened in parallel -> cannot talk about
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one without the other
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- Use example of Asian American literature as entryway toward understanding
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larger American / minority literature
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- _Otherness_: radical difference -> Asian is always "foreigner", "strange",
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"grotesque"
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- Asians come to US for labor shortage (railroads, etc)
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- Perceived through 19th century and further as radically different
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- Assimilation: American promise of leaving behind "tradition" -> "modern life"
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- Theoretical concept -> trickle into daily lives
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- W.E.B. DuBois -> "the problem of the color life" + "double consciousness"
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- Most useful metaphor: double consciousness
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- Double consciousness -> hybridity: rethinking from two different distinct
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selves -> combination / overlapping "hybrid consciousness"
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- Does the arc of history bend toward progress?
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- On style: how do stylistic decisions (by writers) shape their thematic arguments?
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- Leave things out, emphasize, etc
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- On realism, modernism, postmodernism
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- Next: read Erika Lee
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## Section (10/04)
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