HENKE1906U English - Free topic 6: Travel, Communication and the Novel and Recent Asian American Writing

Travel, Communication and the Novel (Maria Damkjær)

Novels thrive on delays, and so as soon as you introduce travel -- even local travel -- information will filter through only intermittently. This course explores novels where letters, secrets, and the meaning of language itself, are bent out of shape by distance and delay. We will discuss critical theory of imagined communities through information, of letters and fiction, and of transport fiction, and read novels from Austen to the present.

Recent Asian American Writing (Kiron Ward)

As a category, ‘Asian American’ is an especially problematic one. It pulls together languages, cultures, and histories from across a vast area—from the South Asian subcontinent to the Pacific Islands—and can assume a simplistic similarity between them. For better or worse, the term has become the accepted way of referring to Americans of Asian descent and of categorising their extraordinary literary production. Drawing on contemporary writing by Americans of South-East Asian descent, this course will introduce students to the exceptional variety and diversity of ‘Asian American’ literature. In particular, we will explore the ongoing formation and contingency of ‘Asian American’ as an identity, and interrogate how gender, sexuality, class, generation, and history shape each text.