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Since the turn of the twentieth century, increasing immigration has become one of the most important forces in creating that stereotype known as the American character: hardy, pragmatic, optimistic, inventive, individualistic, resistant to rules.
Between 1870-1920, 26 million immigrants arrived in the United States--50 times as many as had arrived in the previous 50 years. Most hailed from Eastern and Southern European countries like Poland, Bohemia, Slovenia, unlike earlier generations which came mainly from Western Europe. More recent waves of immigrants have come from almost every nation, and every continent in the world. The immigrant experience remains the central feature of American life, literature and culture, and as has often been said, American history is immigration. The writer Junot Díaz, recollecting himself arriving on the first day of first grade speaking no English and “looking like something out of a wetback comedy,” has remarked that for many Dominican-Americans like himself, immigration meant going back and forth, inhabiting, as he remarked in an interview, two countries and two cultures without feeling entirely at home in either. For a number of immigrants, arrival on American shores is no single event; it means going back and forth, actually or emotionally, constantly travelling between and negotiating more than one language and one culture.
The course will include an autobiography, novels, a story collection, and a series of portraits of young people by an investigative journalist, that illuminate a variety of American immigrant experiences, among them those of Eastern European Jewish-Americans, Irish-German-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Haitian-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and Arab-Americans.
Students should purchase the following at the bookstore:
Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912) PLEASE NOTE: This is also available free online
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975)
Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)
Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain (1992)
T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does it Feel To Be A Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (2009)
Recommended, BUT not required:
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1981)
Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker (1996)
Robert Eisenberg, Boychiks in the Hood (1996)
Junot Díaz, Drown (1997)
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (1999)
Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (2004) and Brother, I’m Dying (2007)
Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner (2004)
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