Department of English

This course will explore the varieties of Asian American experience by considering the literary forms they take. We will read representations of a broad range of Asian American experience, from Asians detained off the coast of California at the turn of the twentieth century to cosmopolitan Asian American lives at the turn of the twenty-first. In each instance, we will read these forms within their historical moments, asking how these expressions reveal and respond to the conditions of minority experience in the United States. Our discussions will analyze these literary representations as a way of attending to shifting modes of racial formation in the United States, and we will pay particular attention to the legacies of exclusion and internment. 

Course requirements: 2 close-reading essays, a midterm, and a final exam.