# Week 1

## Lecture 1 (9/30)

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

## Section (10/04)

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