ENG 393 - Special Topics in English

Instructor
Jung

Spring 2025 - ENG 393 - New Fables of the East Asian Diaspora

In this course, students will explore literary writing as a way of creative self-assertion within a variety of traditions by closely reading poetry, fiction, and essays by Asian Americans, a people of the ongoing Asian diaspora. The literature of the Asian diaspora is a collection of stories and voices of people from many points of origin in the constant process of moving, diffusing, arriving, and re-making themselves in the modern era. Their global movements have resulted in Asian diasporic writings as the site of profound transformations for literature written in English: transformations that came about because of their creative self-assertions within the literary tradition they arrived in. 

These writers and poets are at the crossroads of cultural and historical influences from their origin language and the language in which they live, work, and write. They exist in-between traditions. In a sense, the literature of Asian diaspora is the literature of struggle for imaginative minds claiming singular spaces within the English and American literary tradition through their creativity.

There are many investigate this facet of recent literary history. Our specific focus will be on writers and poets who re-imagine folklore and mythologies from their origin cultures by introducing these elements into English literary forms, and how this re-imagination creates a new space for their creativity to provide meaning for their identities of arrival. Some of the writers and works we will be diving into are Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, Angela Hur’s Folklorn, Monica Sok’s A Nail the Evening Hangs On, and Franny Choi’s Soft Science. 

Satisfies English Department major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.