English

This course surveys Asian North American literature and criticism. Given their similar immigration policies and cultural specificities, North America here includes Canada and the U.S.A., and Asia here is understood as East Asia as South(east) Asia has another complicated British/European colonial history. Since this is an introductory class in nature, students read the excerpts and a long novel from major works from the late 19th century to the present. While discerning the broad scope of Asian American literature as a whole, the course emphasizes the recurring themes, the bi-cultural contexts in which these writers wrote, and their literary experimentation and innovation over the time. To supplement readings of literary texts, students examine selected works of criticism, history, and social sciences. As heterogeneity is a crucial concept in defining the umbrella term “Asian American,” an important goal is to understand Asian North Americans as diverse groups and individuals given their different historical and cultural backgrounds. The course covers both East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Eurasian) and North American (American and Canadian) writers, and also attempts to cover all genres (short story, poetry, fiction, prose, graphics) to give the students a panoramic view of the “heterogeneity” in this quite established discipline.

This course offers students an opportunity to think, speak, and write in English about diverse issues of modern and contemporary society, using readily accessible genres and forms of cultural and social texts, including popular literature, literature for children and adolescents, graphic novels, movies and TV dramas, music, art works, journalistic writings, internet postings, etc. The class may either be organized around a single overarching theme or cover a series of different yet preferably interrelated themes.

This course is a workshop-based class on the topic of culture in multimodal communication. Students explore tools for understanding and analyzing different modes of communication. Particularly, the class focuses on how meaning is made through the interaction of two modes (language and image) in an important modern cultural medium, graphic novels. However, students apply the knowledge gained from this class to other forms of multimodal communication in the world around them.