Reading List

Read Along with Rob

For those of you who are faithful readers of this blog, this term—with its teaching, committee work, and writing—has totally overwhelmed me. I have not taken such a long leave of absence thus far, and I apologize. Good news for an upcoming blog will be my upcoming trip to Honolulu for a conference in January. (Say what you will about the difficulties of living in the Pacific, one plus is that you certainly rack up the frequent flyer miles out here.)

But one teaching assignment is worth sharing. I’ll be teaching our English 320: Ethnic American Literature for my first time spring term, and I want to publicly thank all the Americanist scholars and dutiful readers who helped me settle on a reading list. Here they are: Ann Kottner, Emily Hegarty, Patricia Julius, Minka Barton, Ray Slavens, Evelyn Flores, Chris Schreiner, and anybody else who I can’t think of right now. Many thanks. Those of you who don’t teach have no idea how hard it is to choose a limited number of books from the vast array of wonderful stuff out there; the factors to consider are vast, and settling on these six works took months.

And here’s the final list, for those of you who’d like to drop in via the magic of cyber-syllabi and such. If you want, you can read along with us starting in mid-January; I hope to have a webpage for my courses up by then, and you can cyber-join us across the miles and time zones. I intend to post study guides that my course generates, so if you feel that you don’t have a reading life, you may live vicariously through us.

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Is this the great American novel about the African-American slavery experience and its aftermath? Many people say yes, and say so resoundingly. So far, I’m finding it pretty baffling; the narrative is a wild ride that plays with time and space (and one character is a ghost), but, boy, is Morrison a great prose stylist or what?

Anzia Yezierska, How I Found America: Stories

Yezierska was a turn-of-the-century (the 20^th, not the 21^st) Russian immigrant who wrote stories about turn-of-the-century Russian immigrants. Their range is remarkable: some are funny, many are sad, some will break your heart. Yezierska should be far better known than she is.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

A great coming-of-age memoir about growing up Chinese-American. As Kingston puts it in her subtitle, she had “A Girlhood Among Ghosts”—the ghosts of her ancestors, the ghosts of her family’s culture, the ghost of being one herself as a young girl who wasn’t supposed to be seen or heard. This book has become a classic, deservedly so.

Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

So has this one, by a Mexican-American writer who was the “perfect” student, a scholarship boy, and, I think, the first Hispanic to enter the doctoral program in English at Columbia (which he left before finishing his dissertation). He was miserable a lot of the time. A strong indictment of bilingual education programs and a brilliant memoir which makes him, like Kingston, that tells of the considerable psychological price one pays when one has to constantly straddle two cultures and doesn’t belong to either one.

Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World.

Alexie’s stories about Native Americans on and off the reservations are deeply bitter, very dark, and often plain hilarious. Nobody walks the line between high comedy and savage tragedy better. You might know the movie Smoke Signals, a Native American quest narrative of sorts whose screenplay (which he wrote) was based on a story from one of his collections. I’m not sure how Alexie’s darkness will sell with my students, but this is one of the reasons to teach it—to find out.

Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land.

Multiculturalism as fact of life as opposed to theory. Can a nice, second-generation Chinese-American girl find happiness with a nice East Coast Jewish boy? She can if she’s Mona, whose Chinese family has moved to Scarsdale, New York, where they are the “new Jews,” as she puts it. Eventually she converts (!), to the consternation of her parents. Mona is a delightful smartmouth; Jen is a writer who can say something very important without banging you over the head with didacticism, mostly because you’re laughing too hard.

The focus of the class will be, to use the current theoretical parlance, “crossing borders”—what is it to be an American when you have multiple identities? (I’ve debated titling the course “Fill-in-the-Blank dash American Literature.”) I think that it will sell well here, where everybody is an American, sort of, but not really; though citizens of the States, kind of, we Guamanians are marginal in that we hardly have full citizenship rights. Or, in the case of my many Filipino students, or students from the Federated States of Micronesia or Palau, we’re not all Americans, and some of us want to be, though on our own Pacific Island terms, and not terms dictated by Washington, DC. All of my students cross borders all the time, so I think the course will be a lively free-for-all. So, if you’re interested, call up your (locally owned and operated) bookstore, order away, and read along with us!

Comments

[Lee]

Not that I don't have a reading life or anything, but there are several books on your list by authors that I haven't read (and in a couple of cases, even heard of) and this is the perfect excuse. Looking forward to it.

[Amy]

I bought the book by Gish Jen today while I was at the downtown Borders and I'm looking forward to checking into the other books you've listed. Campus Martius is amazing - they've planted new flowers (again) and have pumpkins and gourds and cornstalks and the fountains are going and the trees are turning and the weather is beautiful. So nice.

Thanks for the list!

Amy on East Forest