Comparing Discussion Topics

A few weeks ago, Seung Hye mentioned that Asian American Lit was a particularly difficult class to teach because of the fact that it is an English literature course as well as an Asian American Studies course, and the students in the class have very diverse academic (and personal) backgrounds. This comment got me thinking about how difficult it is to talk about a novel or short story in the traditional “literary” sense and also spend ample time discussing its social, political, and economic issues/commentaries. I thought it might be cool to examine the issues I have spent most time discussing in this class related to a certain book or story and compare these issues to things that have come up in other English classes I have taken at Scripps and elsewhere (classes that are only English courses, not cross-listed as Asian American Studies, Black Studies, etc).

I recently read Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables in my Survey American Lit class at Scripps. In our discussion, gender roles did come up, as did social conventions, family structure, and the role of tradition. Importantly, Yamamoto’s story was included in the canon (The Health Anthology of American Literature, Volume E) that we have been using for the course. I flipped through the anthology’s table of contents to examine which other Asian American authors the editors had chosen to include, and I was happy to find Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janice Mirikitani, and Jessica Hagedorn, among a few others that I didn’t recognize. I think it is so, so important to include Asian American writers (as well as other minority writers) in the canon; so often the canons of American and British literature consist of almost all white male writers…but that’s another story, and that situation seems to be improving. However, the whole concept of a few editors choosing which works are representative of ‘American Literature, 1945 to the present,’ seems a little ridiculous to me. Back to the point: the group of students who presented on Yamamoto in American Lit did include a few quotes from King-Kok Cheung’s Rhetorical Silences essay, which I was really glad to see; usually, in most of my English courses, we do not read much or any criticisms of the texts. Nonetheless, I felt that in comparison to some of the discussions we have had in Asian American Lit, the discussion we had in the survey course on race seemed rather “distant.” Students’ comments seemed fairly impersonal to me, and I sensed that some of the students felt slightly uncomfortable discussing race, gender, and cultural issues. And despite the fact that we did discuss gender role reversal, we did not at all touch on the gendering of racialization (or what gender role reversal might mean in a larger context outside just this story). I guess I just felt like in American Lit, we did not push the envelope on race and gender in the same way that we did in Asian American Lit. I almost feel like it would have been “inappropriate” in the American Lit course to bring up the gendering of racialization, institutionalized systems of oppression, or whether we can read cross-culturally without essentializing. What might this mean? Also, because we spent less time discussing issues of race, gender, politics, etc. in the American Lit class, we did spend more time on more traditional “literary” stuff (form, style, etc) that we did not discuss as much in Asian American Lit. Is it possible to give full attention to both literary concerns AND issues of race, class, gender, etc? Can you read a novel both ways at the same time? Does one or the other inevitably get sacrificed in any discussion? I just find it very interesting that you can discuss the same work of literature in two totally different ways depending on the class’ particular academic focus.

In reviewing my notes on The Woman Warrior from Asian American Lit as well as my Contemporary Women Writers (CWW) course, I noticed this same difference between the discussions. While we focused largely on topics like the bildungsroman, the kunstlerroman, a usable past, feminism, family, and voice in CWW, we left out a lot of the discussions we have had in Asian American Lit that really probed into issues of race, class, and gender (especially the Frank Chin piece…I really appreciate reading critiques of literary texts. Sometimes as readers we just tend to take things at face value and not challenge or critique them…). However, by spending ample time on those issues, Asian American Lit did have to sacrifice discussions of some of the things we covered in CWW; it does seem that focusing on one aspect of these texts requires letting go of another. Is there simply not enough time in a class to discuss both traditional “literary” concerns and social, political, and economic issues and commentaries? Is it that we have to narrow down discussion to the focus of the class? Whatever the answer is, I agree with Seung Hye that this class is difficult in that we can really look at the texts from so many different perspectives.