ENGL 225
Introduction to Asian American Literature: Fiction and Memoir
Last Offered n/a
Division I W Writing Skills
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This Gateway is for students who want an opportunity to explore some of the wonderful fiction and creative nonfiction written by Asian American writers over the past hundred years. Likely readings include: Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (1946); John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957); Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976); Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995); Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999); lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We are All Looking For (2003); Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013); and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014). As we read, we will attend to the various ways in which the often difficult, and sometimes traumatic, historical experiences of Asian Americans have informed their acts of literary invention. And in order to better understand the broader, ever shifting, social contexts in and against which these literary works were created, we will supplement our primary readings with texts that discuss the experiences of Asian Americans from a historical and sociological perspective.