Special Topics in English Course is repeatable for credit when students take different topics.

Catalog description

In this course, students will embark on a literary exploration, using the medium of creative writing as a means of self-expression within various traditions. We will closely examine poetry, fiction, and essays authored by individuals of East Asian descent, who are part of the ongoing East Asian diaspora. The literature emerging from the East Asian diaspora is a rich tapestry of narratives and voices, representing people from diverse origins who are in constant motion, diffusing, arriving, and reinventing themselves in the modern era. Their global journeys have turned East Asian diasporic literature into a site of profound transformation within the realm of English literature, driven by their creative expressions within the literary traditions they encounter. These writers and poets find themselves at the crossroads of cultural and historical influences, navigating between their origin languages and the languages in which they live, work, and write. They exist in the interstitial spaces, and the literature of the East Asian diaspora embodies the struggle of imaginative minds carving out distinctive spaces within the English and American literary traditions through their creativity. Our exploration of this facet of recent literary history will be centered on writers and poets who re-envision the folklore and mythologies of their source cultures, or those who reimagine tropes from speculative fiction and other genres by incorporating these elements into English literary forms. We will trace how this act of re-imagination creates new avenues for their creativity to infuse meaning into their identities as arrivals in a foreign literary landscape. Satisfies English Department major and minor requirement. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.