HW for March 3 - Animals in On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous

 At the end of the novel, the narrator comments:

"What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story - when our lives are in themselves the story of animals" p.242

Comment on the possible meaning(s) of this sentence and/or associate it with an animal that recurs in the narrative and its possible symbolism.

Intro to Ocean Wong and the context of the The Vietnam War

Ocean Vuong was born in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in 1988, but grew up on a rural farm. Like Little Dog in On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s maternal grandfather was a white American naval officer stationed in Vietnam during the war. Vuong’s grandparents were married and had three children. After the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, however, Vuong’s grandfather went back  home to the United States to visit his family and was unable to return again to Vietnam. In 1990, Vuong’s family fled Vietnam to a refugee camp in the Philippines and later settled in Hartford, Connecticut. Vuong went on to earn a degree in 19th-century English Literature from Brooklyn College and an MFA in poetry from New York University. He published his first chapbook (meaning a small booklet), Burnings, in 2011. Later, in 2014, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, which seeks to promote poetry and culture. In 2016, Vuong published his first full-length book of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. That same year he was awarded the Whiting Award, an annual prize awarded to promising poets and writers. Vuong’s first novel, On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 30 languages in 2019 to critical and popular acclaim, after which he was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, an award that invests in the future work of gifted intellectuals. In 2022, he published his second poetry collection, Time is a Mother. Vuong currently lives in Massachusetts, where he is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program for poets and writers at UMass-Amherst.

The Vietnam War (1955-1975)

In On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong explores the lasting effects of the Vietnam War on his family. He specifically mentions the Tet Offensive, a North Vietnamese attack on South Vietnam in 1968. The Vietnam War, which began in November of 1955 and lasted until the Fall of Saigon in April of 1975, involved the countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Vietnam was divided into the communist state of North Vietnam (which was backed by the Soviet Union and China), and the anti-communist state of South Vietnam (which was backed the United States, South Korea, and other anti-communist countries). The war began when the Việt Cộng—a group of South Vietnamese guerrillas under the command of North Vietnam—attacked South Vietnam. Along with the Việt Cộng, the North Vietnamese army, known as the People’s Army of Vietnam, invaded and attacked South Vietnam and Laos, leading to an increase in American troops in Vietnam. By 1964, American troops in South Vietnam went from 16,000 to 184,000, and both the Americans and the South Vietnamese were engaged and attacked by the Việt Cộng and the People’s Army of Vietnam. On January 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese and the Việt Cộng launched the Tet Offensive, one of the largest attacks of the war. The offensive was given its name because it began on the Tết holiday—the Vietnamese New Year celebration. During the first phase of the Tet Offensive, which was focused on both military and civilian targets, the North sent 80,000 soldiers to invade and attack more than 100 South Vietnamese cities and towns. The first phase of the attack (during which, in the novel, Lan and Paul hide in their Saigon apartment with a gun aimed at the door), lasted nearly two months and resulted in more than 45,000 casualties reported by the South Vietnamese and their allies. The North Vietnamese and Việt Cộng reported over 5,000 soldiers killed in action and more than 7,000 captured. 

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HW for Feb 28 - interview with Ocean Wong + comments

 Listen to this interview about ocean Wong and comment (without forgetting your intersubjective relation to what was said / personal opinion) on either or both of these:

a) a thought or sentence that strikes you on the subject of diasporic subjects in the USA

b) links with the novel (or even reactions to the short excerpt Ocean reads from)

HW: Text and visual analysis practice

 Produce a text / visual analysis of the last page of Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660. I will give individual written feedback to all attempts posted until the 19th Feb at noon.

HW for February 17: Compare text and image analysis

 In this blog you will find an interesting, but not very technical, analysis of some pages of Citizen 13660:

http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2010/10/27/mine-okubo-citizen-13660/

Choose one of the instances and use your skills to improve on that analysis, considering the article on moodle about approaching compositional elements of images (read especially from p. 13 onwards), and the following sum-up:

1) Sensory elements: colour, lighting and texture; 

- shadows, heavy lines, points of light, fabrics and materials

- what emotions are conveyed

2) Structural elements: axes, perspective and depth; 

- horizontal axis - left (given) and right (new)

- vertical axis - up (ideal, spiritual) and down (real, sensual...)

- prominent and secondary elements - how parts contribute to the whole

- center and background

3) Dynamic elements: orientation of figure, gaze and point of tension; 

- figure looking of us (demanding) or away, offering her/himself to our gaze?

- features and postures of characters

4) Emerging elements: directionality and focal point. 

- what is the first thing we notice

- where is the eye drawn to and what directions does it folllow

You will find the analyzed instances of the link above in the following pages of Citizen 13660

p. 74 – toilent partitions

p. 82 – Acme beer

p. 162-163 – pregnant women

An Exhibition of Miné Okubo's "Masterpiece" in the Japanese American National Museum (LA)

 For the 75th Anniversary of the book's first edition 

HW for Feb 14 - How to read a text with pictures?

Start by either:

a) relating the images in your book with this archive:

https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

or
b) commenting on how one or two of the images complement the text that follows it, or otherwise diverges from it.

"I am often asked why am I not bitter and could this happen again? I am a realist with a creative mind, interested in people, so my thoughts are constructive. I am not bitter. I hope that things can be learned from this tragic episode, for I believe it could happen again."
                                                        (Miné Okubo, 1983)

Asian Americans in the US

- Filippinos have been in the US since he 16th century

- 1790: Naturalization Act: only "free white persons" could be citizens.

- Chinese, Korean and Japanese Immigrants arrived to the Hawai in the 19th century

- Chinese immigrants arrived on the West Coast in the mid-19th century. Forming part of the California gold rush, these early Chinese immigrants participated intensively in the mining business and later in the construction of the transcontinental railroa (1862-1869)

- 1848: first North-American Chinatown in San Francisco.

- Although the absolute numbers of Asian immigrants were small compared to that of immigrants from other regions, much of it was concentrated in the West, and the increase of wealth among the Chinese community (while earning lower wages) caused some nativist sentiment known as the "yellow peril".

- Congress passed restrictive legislation prohibiting nearly all Chinese immigration in the 1880s

- 1898: Spanish-American War initiates the US Colonial History. With the Treaty of Paris the US gain control over Cuba and ownership of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands (the latter will regain independence in 1946, after a transition period (Commonwealth) begun in 1935.

- 1917: Asiatic Barred Immigration Act

- After Japan attacked the U.S in 1941 and China formally become an American ally, some within the American media began to criticize the various discriminatory laws against the Chinese and Chinese-Americans. However, the prejudice towards Japanese grew, which didn't help against the yellow peril mania.

- Internment: During World War II, an estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals or citizens residing in the United States were forcibly interned in ten different camps across the US, mostly in the west. The internments were based on the race or ancestry rather than activities of the interned.

1942-1944: Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mine Okubo and her brother were interned to Tanforan Assembly Center and then the Topaz War Relocation Center 

1957 - John Okada, No-no Boy

1961 - Beginning of the US involvement in the War in Vietnam (withdrawal in 1973)

1970s - Asian-American Literature as Category

HW for Feb 10: patterns of cohesion in Symbols and Signs by Vladimir Nabokov.

 After reading chapter 6 (pp. 127-150) of Brian Paltridge's An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, explore patterns of cohesion in the last section of "Symbols and Signs" by Vladimir Nabokov (from "Bending with difficulty" until the end of the short story).

Vladimir Nabokov, "Symbols and Signs" - HW for Feb 7

 see the page of the International Nabokov Society

In "Symbols and Signs", comment on one or more of the following aspects:

1. Use of deictics

2. Character description - the son

3. Contextual references and relation to the time the short story was written (1948)

Excerpt from an article on Julia Kristeva's concept of "the silence of the polyglot"

By Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio. You can read it in full, as well as track references, here: http://www.iass-ais.org/proceedings2014/view_lesson.php?id=74

"Extraneity of one's language is extraneity of one's own conscious, extraneity of the unconscious. “Tell me the language you speak and I will tell you what your unconscious is”: the Freudian postulate recalls that the conscious and the unconscious speak the same language that the subject speaks. Vološinov develops this position in Freudianism, 1927 (see Chapter IX on language, unconscious and ideology).

But the situation in which signification manifests itself glaringly as a heterogeneous process, as nomadism and extraneity, is that of the subject that does not speak its own language, but another language, or better, that speaks a language which, though one's own, resounds all the same as foreign, while the language of origin lives in the nocturnal memory of the body, as a language of other times which, even if it withdraws from possession by the subject, never abandons that subject. Kristeva analyzes this situation in a section of Étrangers à nous-mêmes entitled, “Le silence du polyglotte”.

The subject that speaks a new language can perfect itself as to how to manage a new instrument, but his or her word remains the word of others. In this situation as a speaking subject placed between two languages, in “cette anesthésie de la personne happée par une langue étrangère”, in this “mutisme polyforme” of the polyglot, hetereogeneity of the process of significance itself evidences the doubling of the “unitary” subject, hidden in the normal use of language.

In literary writing the “silence of the polyglot” is transformed into “silence” of the writer, as a listening position, a position that characterizes the writer, that becomes the possibility of distancing, typical of the writer: as Bakhtin says in his 1970-71 notes (in Bakhtin 1986), the writer dresses in silence and uses a language while standing outside it. The writer gives up mastery over the word which is delusory, goes into the listening mode and resorts, through writing, to the “different forms of silence”: irony, allegory, parody, metaphor, parable… Between two languages, as Kristeva observes, the foreigner knows what the loquacious and arrogant native speaker does not know, that it, that nobody is master of one's “own” language (nor is it possible to statalize, to nationalize language, in spite of the “reality” of national languages, on the basis of which identities are established, exclusions are justified and conflicts triggered).

The foreigner knows that with respect to the language he speaks, the language that speaks him, that silence is not only imposed upon him, but is part of him, in him. Here then comes the refusal to say, nothing to say, no reply, no answer to interrogation, to wanting to hear. Not to say anything, there's nothing to say, nothing can be said, the unspeakable (cf. Kristeva 1988: 28–29). With respect to this situation, the way out is writing. "

Text Analysis (Teacher's Model) - excerpt from "Silence"

Suggested topics: theme(s) and structure; importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; subject of the enunciation; point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee; rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes (descriptive or lyric manner, figures of speech, symbolism, innovation / surprising markers, collocations, or pattern traces within the author’s work); intertextuality with texts studied in this class or others. 

from "Now he had been alone for five years in this town" to "attachment to the strange girl"

In this excerpt from “Silence,” a short story by the Filipino-American writer Carlos Bulosan (1913-195) that was published posthumously, we are led through a third-person focalization into a moment in the life of an unnamed solitary life where the possibility of change and release from enclosure is contemplated. This possibility is arguably symbolized by the presence of “green curtains hanging on his window,” green being the color of hope, and by the suggestion of romance with a female character whom the protagonist watches “reading” and whose dress code the protagonist tries to “match,” indicating an attempt at communication, dispelling an haunting silence of many years.

            The first part of the excerpt, constituted by short sentences indicating habit (repetition of “He would”) and succession (suggested by the connectors “Then,” “and), shows a fastidious routine (“as he had done thousands of mornings before”). This routine is marked by dysphoric adjectives  - “eyes open and withdrawn” – and verbs – for instance, “fumble in the semidarkness”, “thinking nothing” – that suggest alienation and impotence.

            The paragraph that starts with an adversative “But now” seems to indicate change, even if its realization is delayed. Temporal markers are indefinite and not particularly rigorous: the “five years” of solitude in town seem to confirm an earlier reference (“now it was five years since he had talked to another human being”), but we were also told by the incipit that there previously had been “the silence of other years”. This adds up to a sense of indefinite time, compounded by indefinite place. Objects seem to be the only companions of the man but they are not placed anywhere precise (no names of neighborhoods or towns). Inanimate things, however, are treated as persons, as shown by the affective use of the verbs “caress” (applied to chair) and “converse with” (applied to everything in his room). The adversative “But” is again repeated, followed by the temporal marker “Sunday morning” and we are then led to the moment of the possibility of change, associating the green color of curtains to the threshold of the window and to the lawn of a college (possibly suggesting the mobility of higher education). The spotting of a girl (who is also nameless and at first only referenced) is signaled with the first inequivocally positive adjectives of the text: “excited” and “surprised.”

            Change is explicit in the next paragraph and compounded by the replacement of a negative image with a positive one, which furthermore contains an alliteration in “f” that reinforces the flow of light (“flood of light flowed warmly”). Next, a comparison dispels the interior silence (“as if he had heard little foices inside him”). The light seems to bring in attention to colour (white sweater, grey skirt, brown hair, green curtains), and the effect is the first and only utterance marked in direct speech in the text. The protagonist’s exclamation, however, is ambiguous, since it expresses terror (at the lack of agreement between the girl’s clothing and the colors of his window) but also an urge to action.

            Finally, the last part of the excerpt might indicate that this urgency of action is restorative of the protagonist’s agency (he leaves the house running), although there is also the negative suggestion that the girl might “give him back his silence”, leaving the reader undecided about the turn of the narrative.
            The story seems to refer to the condition of the immigrant / ex-pat (in fact, we know the empiric author, Carlos Bulosan, came from the Philippines, which at the time was a colony ceded by Spain to the US), and feelings of isolation, confinement, invisibility and incapacity to utter and act, are pervasive. The title "Silence" is as explicit as the "events" in the short story are evasive. We could therefore contrast it with the extolment, by South-Asian author Bharati Mukherjee, later on, of the duality of the colonial writer and the way s/he can cash on it by investing on “maximalist” writing. ("Immigrant Writing", 1988). The unnamed protagonist of "Silence" simply cannot "match" and it seems that, unlike the mild and welcoming Statue of Liberty sang by Emma Lazarus, he cannot even "cry with silent lips."