2009/09/01
What my classes are doing…
It’s a new semester–huzzah!
My classes are having good discussions. My 101s have been reading excerpts from Crevecoeur and have been doing some very nice work with the text–I’m very pleased, and I look forward to seeing what they do with the rest of the readings from the semester. I think these kinds of texts (I’m using Ideas Across Time as the textbook) inspire them to think about important and interesting topics (in this case, notions of America and of egalitarian society). They have enjoyed debating the definition of Americans and wrestling with how his account of his encounter with the caged slave affects that definition. I’m curious to see what they’ll do with Tocqueville‘s distinction between equality and liberty. (Heck, I’m wondering what I’LL do with that distinction!)
My lit class had a great discussion–almost 60 minutes–on Lu Xun‘s “A Madman’s Diary.” I had to force them to move to the other short stories for the day (Premchand and Akutagawa). This week we read the fourth book of Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels–I hope we can lay a good foundation in cultural contact for our later discussions of how travelers write about their encounters with other cultures. I surprised myself by making a connection between Gulliver’s “enlightenment” about European society and the madman’s “craziness” regarding the Chinese culture of his day.
2009/08/05
Poetic Meter v? Musical Meter v? Fragmented Syntax
In my continuing attempts to “conquer” modern poetry, I’ve been slowly working my way through Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell’s book Sound and Form in Modern Poetry. This book is useful because it includes a large numbers of 20th-century English-language poets, gives each of them a separate section, and analyzes numerous examples of their prosody. It’s mostly helpful, although there are times when I’m not sure I’m hearing the same thing they’re hearing, and plenty of times when they seem much more affected by the poetic effects than I am. But in general, it does a good job of writing for the person who doesn’t already “get” modern poetry.
I think that this book may have helped me realize where my problems lie, especially with free-verse prosody: Read the rest of this entry »
2009/07/13
Americanization changes immigrants’ sense of home
Interesting article at MSNBC.com. I always find this phenomenon interesting when it comes up in class: immigrants return home and realize they’ve changed–and that creates new, often unexpected, issues about where “home” is.
Outlaws in the United States, strangers at home
Almost at once upon his return, he was felled by a bout of the turistas. His Arlington County-born toddler, Marvin, also took sick, and Sanchez nearly panicked at the difficulty in finding a doctor. His wife, Gladys, was no longer comfortable in the traditional garments of Mayan women, finding them heavy and stiff compared with the Old Navy blouses and jeans she bought at Potomac Mills.
At the airport, they were met by nieces and nephews Sanchez had never seen. Even the elderly couple at the front of the crowd was hard to recognize.
“When I saw my parents for the first time, it was like they were different people,” Sanchez said. “I thought everything was going to be the same. I was wrong. Everything is different, including me.”
On the one hand, they don’t realize how much they’ve gotten used to aspects of American culture. On the other hand, they don’t realize how much life in their homeland has changed in their absence.
The article also describes the way immigrants often group together in their new country:
In Washington, Sanchez lived in a Guatemalan bubble. Immigrants tend to follow each other to U.S. cities, and a huge proportion of Guatemalans in Washington come from certain villages of the Western Highlands. Those from Excumucha, for example, live mostly in Langley Park. Those from next-door Concepción make Arlington their base.
I’m familiar with this same phenomenon in literature about life in Chinatown or in Jewish “ghettos.” What I’ve noticed through the texts is that these communities, while very useful for providing support networks for immigrant communities, also shield them from recognizing how much they’ve changed–and how far they have to go to be considered American.
For instance, in Toshio Mori‘s collection Yokohama, California, the residents of that “Japantown” see themselves as American; it’s only in the stories written after Pearl Harbor that the characters realize that they aren’t seen as American by the Anglo communities around them. Likewise, one of Abraham Cahan‘s characters realizes how different he has become–and how much his hometown differs from his memory of it–when he returns home to Poland in “The Imported Bridegroom.”
It’s an odd thing for my students to realize. Many students don’t want to think about immigrants as being truly American (they would never admit that, but in discussing immigrant experiences, they retain the vocabulary of difference), so it confuses them to realize that even after a few years, immigrants have Americanized enough that they can’t simply return home. I think it also bothers students to realize that the same thing might happen to them if they spend substantial time in another country.
Of course, from a Christian perspective, this is what happens to all converts. We might continue to live in our country of birth, but it’s no longer home. In a way, Christians have a lot to learn from immigrants about the experience of defining “home.”
2009/07/12
Literature’s hottest new stars are already dead
Interesting article at The Guardian about how the literary publishing world is surviving the economic crisis thanks to previously unknown or unpublished works by some of our greatest authors:
Meet the newest literary stars of America
Authors whose newly discovered or revised works are now being published in the US include Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, JRR Tolkien, William Styron, Mary Shelley and Ernest Hemingway.
Why are these finds so economically viable?
Such big names offer publishers the prospect of free publicity and a built-in fan base. “It is a predetermined audience. Publishers love that,” said Laura Dawson, chief executive of the publishing industry consultancy firm LJN Dawson. “It is like manna from heaven.”
I was talking with some folks at this year’s MELUS conference about which literature courses were most popular with college students. My colleagues pointed out that we need to continue requiring that students take courses in pre-1800 literature because otherwise those classes never fill up. It seems students really do prefer the more modern authors. But we quickly realized that they aren’t taking ethnic American or even contemporary literature. No, they’re most interested in Hemingway and Woolf and their kin.
I usually think these folks get too much scholarly attention, but if it keeps publishers afloat nowadays, I will be thankful!
