Here Or There format (some students will attend in person and others online)
LSE/CSAP, HAP
Description:
Karen Tei Yamashita’s fiction has won numerous awards. She is the author of four novels; two memoirs; a collection of plays; short stories, essays, and a new collection of short fiction, forthcoming in 2020. Her writing has gained scholarly attention in the humanities and the social sciences, and has been adopted in the US, Japan, Okinawa, the People’s Republic of China, Austria, Taiwan, Brazil, Germany, and the UK. Yamashita’s body of work has garnered substantial scholarly attention: numerous scholarly papers from the humanities and social sciences; Ling Jinqi’s Across Meridians: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Literary Universe, published in 2013, was the first scholarly book devoted entirely to her fiction, to be followed in 2018 by a collection of critical essays, edited by A. Robert Lee. In 2021, a Modern Language Association book, Approaches to Teaching the Work of Karen Tei Yamashita, co-edited by R Hsu, will join Jolie Sheffer’s 2020 monograph, Understanding Karen Tei Yamashita.
This seminar examines Yamashita’s writing (short stories, essays, drama, and novels) for their narrative innovations in what I will label “Asia-Pacific transcultural poetics,” her experiments in blending genres, and her profound engagement with cultural texts such as television, film, and comics. Additionally, Yamashita’s Brazil novels — Brazil-Maru, Through the Arc of the Rainforest, and Circle K Cycles–have been credited with deconstructing the claims of “America” and in creating Asian American counter-narratives against the restrictive and phantasmagoric master script of “America.” Yamashita’s writing situates cultural and literary interactions across many decades between many Asias and the Americas, north, central, and south. Her writing also uses her literary influences — such as Borges and Garcia Marquez, Sei Shonagon, Paul Valery, James Joyce, John Barth, Studs Terkel, and Italio Calvino — to radically deconstruct concepts of race, power, and nation.
This course uses the iconic novel I Hotel, with a specific focus on the novellas on Hawai’i, as the centrifugal narrative, branching out from there to examine its rhizomic formulations with short excerpts from Yamashita’s other books and literary influences that are most germane to deconstructing power and nation in the Capitalocene. The reading list also contains excerpts from selected historical texts that articulate essential elements of dominant tropes of “America.”
Student Learning Outcomes:
Develop a complex understanding of the contributions of Asian/Asian American literature and cultures to the formation of the field of English Studies (specifically north American literary studies in the 21st Century as formulated from this Hawai’i, Asia-Pacific location);
Develop a stronger ability to undertake advanced critical analysis in both written and oral formats;
Develop a stronger ability to undertake advanced research methods and to prepare an essay for submission to an academic or literary journal;
Develop a complex understanding of the origins and consequences of literary and cultural interpretative frameworks based on concepts of identity and subjectivity, at varying discursive scales.
Probable Assignments:
One forum post every two weeks; responsible for leading seminar discussion; one 12-15-page research-based paper; one book or film review to be submitted to literary or academic journal, OR 8-page conference paper to be submitted to an upcoming conference.
Primary texts by Karen Tei Yamashita:
Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (new edition, 2019);
Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance: (2014; selection);
Selection of essays (“Borges & I,” on Moby Dick and Godzilla; Hello Kitty)
Additional Primary texts:
Amiri Baraka (selection from poetry, essays);
Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste (selection);
The Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh (circa sixteenth century) by Shi Nalan (selection);
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees (selection)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (selection);
Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation (one or two episodes)
Secondary texts include:
Documentary videos on protest songs of the Civil Rights Movement; Motown, and Anna May Wong;
Nomadland (2021 film);
Allan, Kathryn. et al. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (2015; selection);
Marc Auge, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (2009; excerpt);
Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (selection)
Martin Buber, I-thou (selection);
Victor Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”