Post blog response about Ceremony here

Why do you think that Marmon Silko mixes poetry and prose in Ceremony? What effect does this choice have on the reader/ on the reader’s conception of Native American identity?

Blog Post about Mona in the Promised Land

We talked in class about how often Gish Jen portrays ethnic and racial identity as choice-based. How does Jen’s depiction of Asian American identity differ from that of Sui Sin Far (the writer we read at the beginning of class), for instance? What about from Morrison and Quninonez? Do you think we can choose our own ethnic identities or parts of different ethnic identities to make up our selves? Or, is there something essential and immutable about ethnicity and race? Write a blog post of 1-2 paragraphs on the topic and post it here.

Blog Post About Kingston

Post a blog entry about your reading of The Woman Warrior. What role do speech and writing play in The Woman Warrior? Why do you think these themes are so important to the text? How do they relate to ethnicity and gender, two of Hong Kingston’s preoccupations?

Also: Does the fact that the work is semi-autobiographical change how we read it? Is The Woman Warrior a work that deserves to be at the heart of the new American canon? (Think here about some of our earlier discussions about canonicity, and how the value of literary works is determined). We will discuss your comments in class.

Please answer any or all of these questions in a 1-2 paragraph posting

For those interested in seeing more from Maxine Hong Kingston's talk about writing, check out the following.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in California in 1940 to Chinese immigrants. The third of eight children, Hong Kingston became a passionate and prolific writer at an early age. She eventually majored in English at UC, Berkeley--the university at which she taught for many years after the publication of The Woman Warrior and various other novels and works of criticism.

Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in 1976. Hong Kingston's book introduced American readers to a never-before-witnessed topic: Chinese-American girlhood, and the unique marriage of gender and ethnicity present in growing up as a Chinese woman in America. Hong Kingston's book blends memoir, fiction, and biography together to create an unique document of the era and ethnic background in which she grew up. It also introduces a topic central to both her own literary project and that of Morrison in Beloved--that of haunting. Are we all haunted by often silent and silenced familial pasts? Is the American story a narrative of erasures and the ghosts these erasures create?

Hong Kingston's work will allow us to ask many questions central, too, to our own project in Topics in Ethnic American Literature. Using her book, we will discuss the ethics of representation. Does Hong Kingston have the right to represent her ancestors' stories? Is her hybrid text a response to the difficulties of representation? Is there something unethical or, rather, heroic about telling the stories that many think would be better off not told? The Woman Warrior will also help us to look at the place of the immigrant story in America and American mythology. How is the immigrant experience in America the ultimate American narrative, told over and over again in the many novels we will read this quarter?

Ernesto Quinonez and Bodega Dreams

Like Chino, the main character in Bodega Dreams, Ernesto Quinonez was born in Spanish Harlem and spent his early years responding to the vicissitudes of life in the barrio. Quinonez' novel revises and subverts Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and asks us to think seriously about how ethnic identity and poverty affect "The American Dream." How does Quinonez rewrite Fitzgerald's story? How are all the characters in this novel working to remake themselves? What vision of Puerto Rican identity in America does Quinonez present to his readers?

For more on Quinonez, check out this youtube video of him giving a reading: