HW for March 4: How to Read a Text with Images

 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 of the images below might complement the text that follows them, or otherwise diverge 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 (17 October 1587, to the coast of California as part of the Galleon Trade between the Spanish Easte Indies and the Spanish American Colonies; at the end of the 18th century there was a 'Manila' colony in New Orleans)

- 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, particularly impelled to leave because of the Opium Wars, 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 Mar 2: Close reading of Nabokov's excerpt in the class

 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. 

HW for Feb 25 - Close reading of the end of Carlos Bulosan's "Silence"

 Do a close reading of the part that begins "So, from then on, he never admitted anyone into his room", until the end of the short story 

paying special attention to: "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)"

HW for Feb 25: Vladimir Nabokov, "Symbols and Signs"

  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)

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 "He would lie in bed" 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."

HW for Feb 23: Carlos Bullosan, "Silence" (194?)

 

Choose either one of the following suggestions for analysis:

1. Write a close-reading textual analysis of the excerpt from "Silence" that starts in the middle of the second paragraph, "He would lie in bed, eyes opened" until the end of the first sentence of the last paragraph ("pulled frantically at the curtains and ran out of the room") - anthology pp. 17-18

2. Do you think the literary practice of Carlos Bulosan contrasts or agrees with what Mukherjee advocates in "Give us your Maximalists"? (anthology, pp. 8-11)