Candace Fujikane
Summer Session 1 2020
English 320: Introduction to English Studies (DL)
In this course, we will all be examining our roles as critics who read, think, and write about literary and cultural texts. As literary critics, we will begin by engaging in close textual analyses of the ways that stories are told and the narrative strategies writers use to challenge or transform the material conditions of their lives. We will discuss basic literary terminology, concepts, methods, and practices that illustrate the connections among people who read and write texts and the larger conditions of production and systems of power in which their texts are produced and read. We will be analyzing different genres of writing (poetry, short stories, novels, films, autobiographies, personal essays, inscriptions of mo‘olelo) and how these forms are used in ways that respond to material conditions, including historical events and movements.
We will be focusing in particular on definitions and discussions of ideology and the social relations of power that underpin the ideological functions of literature. With this in mind, we will compare different points of entry into analyzing a range of texts assigned for the course, approaches that foreground the intersectionality of class, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, indigeneity, and location, and then we will examine how these multiple and interlocking critical frameworks cannot be separated from each other even as they are often made (problematically) to compete with each other. Some approaches, like literary mapping techniques, go beyond an emplotment of geographical spaces to mapping the social relations between people, their relationship to land, and the epistemological underpinnings of these relationships. We will also map out our own positionality as readers as we engage in a careful examination of the processes by which we “make meaning.”
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) include an awareness of critical approaches to the contemporary field of English Studies, including the purpose, practice, and potential of literary and rhetorical study of texts that include such subfields as American literature, indigenous literatures, ethnic literatures, rhetoric, genre studies and cultural studies; written and oral ability to situate the study of these literatures within broader critical and historical conversations. Students will improve their ability to ask questions of and to read, analyze, and interpret complex literary texts, using relevant literary terminology critically and creatively within the conventions of academic writing. Consideration given to Hawaiian texts in cultural and historical context.
Requirements: One two-page paper, two four-page papers, peer-editing, short assignments, a final exam, attendance and participation.
Required Texts (will be available at UH Bookstore):
- Zamora Linmark,Rolling the R’s(1995)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2015)
Brandy Nālani McDougall, The Salt-Wind / Ka Makani Pa‘akai (2008)
Out of print—on Laulima:
Wachowski Brothers. The Matrix: The Shooting Script (2001)
Required course reader available during the second week of school at Professional Image
3520 Waialae Ave. (next to Boston’s Northend Pizza) Tel: (808) 973-6599.
English / Ethnic Studies 370: Literatures of Hawai‘i (DL, HAP)
In this course, we will be reading literatures written by a broad range of writers who focus on the importance of the languages, cultures, and knowledges that shape and are shaped by Hawai‘i as a place. We will first examine the ways that Kanaka ‘Ōiwi writers like Queen Lili‘uokalani trace their genealogies back to the kulāiwi, the ancestral lands, mapping through mo‘olelo, stories and histories, the literary and cultural significance of places that are a part of our daily lives. We start with the story of the overthrow to understand the political history of Hawaiʻi and its ongoing significance in the contemporary Hawaiian independence movement. Later, many other narratives emerged from efforts in the 1970s to define a “local” identity in community struggles to protect leased agricultural lands slated for commercial and urban development. Visual texts of local solidarity in newspapers show people linking their arms in a human blockade across Kamehameha Highway in front of the Waiāhole Poi Factory in protest against the police-enforced eviction of farmers. Throughout the course, we willsketch the literary, historical and political contexts that map our knowledge and reading of land and places in Hawai‘i. We will discuss the complexities of local communities, such as the survival strategies of a young local Filipino boy growing up gay and working-class in Kalihi and the sexual trafficking of Korean women to the local bar system on Ke‘eaumoku Street that is the transnational legacy of Japanese and U.S. militarism in Korea. As we learn from these stories, we will also be reading and learning from Hawaiian movements for life, land, and sovereignty that have impacted the lives of all people in Hawaiʻi. We will conclude by following in the footsteps of Keaomelemele as she travels around the islands, mapping the stories and ʻŌiwi knowledges of different places in Hawai‘i. Through the knowledge we gain from mapping these stories of places in Hawai‘i that continue to exist or are being restored, we will work toward envisioning a decolonial and more sustainable future for Hawai‘i.
This course has a Hawaiian and Asian or Pacific Issues (H) Focus designation. Hawaiian and Asian issues are fully integrated into the main course material and will constitute at least 2/3 of the course content.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) include an awareness of the contributions of the literatures of Hawaiʻi to the formation of the contemporary field of English Studies, including such subfields as twentieth-century American literature, indigenous literature, ethnic literatures, rhetoric, genre studies and cultural studies, written and oral ability to situate the study of these literatures within broader critical and historical conversations.
Requirements: Two 4-page papers, 6 1-page response papers, a final exam, attendance and participation.
Required Texts (available UH Bookstore)
Queen Lili‘uokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (1898)
Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Hawaiʻi(1998)
- Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s (1995)
Nora Okja Keller, Fox Girl (2002)
Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Ikaika Hussey and Erin Kahunawai Wright, eds, A Nation
Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty (2014)
Moses Manu, Keaomelemele, translated by Mary Kawena Pukui (out-of-print: copy
will be available on Laulima)
A course reader will be available on Laulima: https://laulima.hawaii.edu/portal