Reading & Composition

“To speak is to blunder,” confessed the Chinese American writer Yiyun Li. Nabokov put it more melodramatically: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom.”

Does writing in a foreign language necessarily put one at a disadvantage? Can one’s blunder and accent—often frowned upon as evidence of linguistic deficiency—defy the normative forces of the hegemonic language? How was such resistance fetishized by metropolitan readers as exotic echoes of imperial prowess in colonial literature? Can the colonial past cast critical light on the dreams of multiculturalism and multilingualism in the global hegemony of English?

To answer these questions, this course brings the history of East Asian colonial literature into conversation with Asian American writings of our day. We will start the semester by reading works by colonial-era Taiwanese and Korean writers who were forced to write in Japanese. We will then examine how Asian diasporic writers grapple with the distance between languages, and how Asian American writers confront the anxieties of identity through their lost mother tongues. By exploring the aesthetic, critical, and ethical possibilities of literature, we make meaning out of the private tragedies of loss, alienation, immigration, and intergenerational trauma. The goal of this course is to help students to find their own critical voice by empowering, rather than erasing, their diverse cultural and linguistic background. English as Second Language students are especially welcomed.