Core Course 2 American Dreams, American Realities: The Literature of Immigration and the Ethnic American Experience

This four-session course will cover immigrant/ethnic literature from the turn of the 20th century to the turn of the 21st century. The suggested selections work with first generation immigrants who leave their home countries, as well as with relationships between first and second generation (American born) children. A few selections deal with African American and Native American migrations, since the literary and historical motif of the journey is endemic to all Americans throughout our history.

The goals of this course are to have students work with the following “big picture” questions that are relevant to all four sessions of the course and will help them make connections over time, across immigrant/ethnic literatures, with their own reading and understandings of what constitutes “American” literature, and with their sense of their own ethnic/cultural/gender/national sense of identity.

Photo credit: Welcome to all! color lithograph by J. Keppler. Co. 1880 Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

About the Consulting Scholar

Discussion Questions

Through class discussion, assigned readings, and in-class videos, students in this course will work to answer the following discussion questions, among others:

1. What do you think it means to be an “American” as distinct from any other national group?


2. Is being an American “ethnic” writer different from being an “American” writer? Based on your readings for the course, what have immigrant/ethnic writers contributed to American literature?


3. What modes of assimilation/transculturation/transnationalism are explicit and implicit in the literature you are reading? In other words, how do immigrant/ethnic writers or characters define themselves in terms of their ethnic group? Family? Community? The U.S.? The land from which they or their parents came? What are the costs/benefits of becoming American?


4. What similarities/differences in themes, identities, families, social relationships and language do you find between male and female writers and across different ethnic groups? Between first and second-generation writers? What larger thematic and identity patterns do you uncover over the course, independent of the writer’s immigrant/ethnic background?


5. The literary value of ethnic literature is often relegated to second-class status, as though this literature was sociology, rather than constructed through imagination, even if based on “real life.” How do the writers you read craft their work in terms of narration, literary images, language (standard English, dialect, use of foreign words/idioms0 and what differences do these literary devices make in your reading of the works?


6. What kinds of struggles do you find between first and second-generation immigrants in the themes of the stories? How are these struggles similar or different from the ones you had with your parents or grandparents?

Kathleen Conzen et al, “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Studi Emigrazione/Etudes Migrations:

An International Journal of Migration Studies, Vol. 19, No. 105, March 1992. The best single essay on ethnic identity formation

Reed Way Dasenbrook, “Teaching Multicultural Literature,” Understanding Others: Cultural and Cross Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Literature. Ed. Joseph Trimmer. National Council of the Teachers of English, 1992, pp. 35-46. Thomas Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America. University of Chicago Press, 1993.

John Higham, “The Transformation of the Statue of Liberty” in Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America. Atheneum, 1975. A fascinating story of the changing symbolic meaning of the “Statue of Liberty” from 1883 to the 1940s. There is also a fine essay on Abraham Cahan in this volume.

Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Ways of Reading, eds. Donald Bartholome and Anthony Petrosky. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999, pp. 582-598.

Amrijit Singh et al., ed. Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literature. Northeastern University Press, 1994, “Introduction” and “Narrating Memory.”

Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. Oxford University Press, 1986, especially sections 1, 7, 8. Sollors is one of the leading American scholars on ethnic literature.

Werner Sollors, ed., “Introduction: After the Culture Wars: From English Only to English Plus,” Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. New York University Press, 1998, pp. 1-13.

Bonnie TuSmith, All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literature. University of Michigan Press, 1993, Chs. 1 and 6.

Maxine Seller, ed. Immigrant Women. SUNY Press, rev. 2nd ed., 1994

Late 19th/Early to Mid 20th Century Immigrant/Ethnic Fiction and Memoirs
Thomas Wheeler, The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American. Penguin, 1971.

Jewish American
Abraham Cahan, “Yekl” (1896) from Yekl, the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories. Dover, 1970.
Anzia Yezierska, “Soap and Water,” from Hungry Hearts & Other Stories (1920). Persea Books, 1985.

Chinese American
Sui Sin Far, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” “The Inferior Woman,” from Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (1912). Amy Ling, ed.. University of Illinois, 1995.

Italian American
Pietro di Donato, Ch. 1, “Geremio,” Christ in Concrete. Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1937.

Jerry Mangione, Ch. 4, “Talking American,” Mount Allegro: A Memoir of Italian American Life (1942). Columbia University Press, 1981.

Norwegian
Ole Rolvaag, Book I, Ch. 2, “Homefinding,” Giants in the Earth (1927), Harper and Row, 1955. Pair with clips from the film “The New Land,” with Liv Ullman and Max Von Sydow. The film is based on Johan Bojer’s Swedish immigrant epic, The Emigrants, and Vilhelm Moberg’s Unto a Good Land.

Slovak
Thomas Bell, Part I, sections 1-4, “Kracha,” from Out of This Furnace: A Novel of Immigrant Labor in America (1941). University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.

Post-World War II through Early 21st Century Anthologies
Wesley Brown and Amy Ling, eds. Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. Persea Books, 2002.

Maria Gillan and Jennifer Gillian, eds. Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American. Penguin, 1999.

Maria Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, ed. Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American. Penguin, 1999.

Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn, ed. Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural. Pantheon, 1998.

Robert Pack and Jay Parini, eds. American Identities: Contemporary Multicultural Voices, eds. University Press of New England, 1994.

Ramini Srikanth and Esther Iwanaaga. eds. Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing. Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Excerpts from Longer Works

Chicano/Chicana/Latino/Latina
Gloria Anzuldua, “To live in the Borderlands means you,” from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Sandra Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek,” from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Vintage, 1991.

Daniel Groody, “The Drama of Immigration and the Cry of the Poor,” from Alambrista and the U.S. Mexican Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants, eds. Nicholas Cull and David Carrasco. University of New Mexico Press, 2004 (comes with DVD of Robert Young’s 1977 documentary on illegal immigrants from Mexico).

Richard Rodriguez, “Complexion,” from Hunger of Memory. Bantam, 1982.

Caribbean American
Julia Alvarez, “A Genetics of Justice,” from Something to Declare: Essays. Plume, 1998. J

ulia Alvarez, “Daughter of Invention,” from How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Penguin, 1992.

Edwidge Danticat, Ch. 7, from Breath, Eyes, Memory. Random House, 1995 (Haitian).

Patricia Powell, Ch. 2, Part 7, from Me Dying Trial. Heinnemen. 1993 (Jamaican).

Asian American
Frank Chin, Chs, 1 and 2, from Donald Duk. Coffee House Press, 1991 (Chinese). <

Gish Jen, “Who’s Irish?” from Who’s Irish?: Stories. Knopf, 1999 (Chinese).

Maxine Hong Kingston, “White Tigers,” from The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Vintage, 1975 (could be paired with Disney’s Mulan) (Chinese).

Wakako Yamauchi, “Old Times, Old Stories” from Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir, ed Garrett Hongo. Feminist Press, 1994 (Japanese).

Journeys Home: The Second Generation Returns to the Homeland
Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Interpreter of Maladies,” from The Interpreter of Maladies. Houghton Mifflin, 2000 (Indian American).

Andrew Pham, “Mecca-Memory,” from Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and

Memory of Vietnam. Farrar, Straus, 1999 (Vietnamese American).