The 31st Annual MELUS ConferenceAssignments

Snow Day Assignment

Due to inclement weather MIT students completed a Snow Day Assignment in lieu of a lecture for Session 2. This assignment was due the day after Session 2 was supposed to take place.

Essays

Students in this course had the opportunity to come up with their own paper topics after having one-on-one consultations with the instructor. Essays were graded based on the following:

Ideas and argument
Organization and paragraph structure
Mechanics, documentation and writing style

Essay 1

Length: 5 pages

Due: Session 8

Example paper topics:

“The Effect of Splash Panels in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”
“The Use of the Spanish Language in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
“Past and Present Laid Out in Maus I”
“Cats and Mice: The Visual and Literal Creation of Identity in Maus by Art Spiegelman”
“Jazz Music Echoed in Jazz by Toni Morrison”
“How Junot Díaz Uses Yunior to Contradict Traditional Notions of Love"
“Healing and Emotional Resonance in Jazz”

Essay 2

Length: 5 pages

Due: Session 14

Example paper topics:

“Balancing Ideologies Through Surrender in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf”
“Uncanniness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hema and Kaushik”
“The Tragic Earth of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth”
“The Rights of Death: The Camera and Photography in Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri”
“Final Epigraph in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf”
“The Irony of ‘Once in a Lifetime’”
“The Uncanny Influence of Family on Indian-American Identity”

Essay 3

Length: 10 pages

Due: Session 26

Example paper topics:

“Where’s the Melting Pot?: The Lack of American Integration in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”
“The Role of Literature in Broadening Human Connection: An Analysis of the Value of Ethnic Identities in Diaz’s Oscar Wao, Lahiri’s Hema and Kaushik, and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”
“Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode Titles’ Influences in The Round House by Louise Erdrich”
“Star Trek and the Colonial Gaze in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House”
“The History of Nostalgia and Its Impact on The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The House on Mango Street, and Jazz”
“Connecting Across Time and Space: Dogen’s Buddhism and I-Novels in Ruth Ozeki’s Novel A Tale for the Time Being”

Example student work

“Disruption to Personal Identity in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being” (PDF) - Courtesy of Isabel Chien and used with permission.

“Where’s the Melting Pot?: The Lack of American Integration in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist” (PDF) - Courtesy of Nwamaka Amobi and used with permission.

MELUS Conference Report/Project

Due: Sessions 19 and 21

For Conference Reports, students attended The 31st Annual MELUS Conference and wrote a report describing their experience.

Note: Grading for the MELUS project involves two parts of equal weight. The report has been evaluated on the basis of the assignment guidelines, with consideration given to: research (use of materials, works cited) and relevance (ideas, discussion questions). Evaluation of the reflection is based on evidence of significant engagement with the conference, as shown in expression of ideas and critical handling of details.

Example report topics:

“Ayana Mathis”
“The Round House by Louise Erdrich”
“Iyko Day”
“An Interview with Joaquín Terrones”
“Village Life and the Environment in Mia Heavener’s Writing”
“Samuel Delany”
“Club Americano”

In weeks 11 and 12, we break from our typical classroom activities to attend and attend to the MELUS (Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the US) conference at MIT. This event offers an opportunity to meet and interact with exciting panelists and keynote speakers, writers and scholars in the field of ethnic literature; to research a topic of your own, on which you might draw for a final essay; and to share with the class an unusual intersection of lives inside and outside the classroom. You will also be the only undergraduate students at the conference prepared to ask questions of and engage directly with conference participants.

Week 9

Decide on the event, topic, and paper(s) or panel(s) that interest you most and submit your topic by Session 17. You may wish to address favorite writers we have not covered in class, explore more deeply the ones we’ve discussed, or take up topics that excite you—questions of gender, family, race, nation, language, colonialism, migration, aesthetics, or others.
Plan a three-part project that includes an in-class presentation with print handout (Session 20 or 21), a visit to the conference, and a follow-up reflection paper (250–500 words) due in class Session 21.

Week 10

Research your topic in whatever ways are most appropriate: searching scholarly databases at MIT Libraries; scanning more recent materials—reviews, interviews, or blogs; contacting a panelist or speaker for advice or an interview (see “Ideas for In-Class Presentation”).
Ask me to send you the abstract of any paper/panel you plan to attend. A word of caution: usually written six months before the conference takes place, these tend to be general, abstract in more ways than one. They can give you a sense, though, of the speaker’s approach, perhaps even a brief bibliography.

Weeks 11–12

Session 19: Read the extract from Mia Heavener’s forthcoming novel, Under Nushagak Bluff, and be prepared to ask questions and discuss. (Note: This reading is not available however, OCW users may read the short story, “Blurry” as a substitution.)
Presentations Sessions 20 and 21 (see details on reports below).
Week 12: attend conference, take notes, meet people, enjoy.

Guidelines for Reports

In-class presentations should take ten minutes.
Format may feature slides or other enhancements but should include a one-page print handout containing salient facts and points, focused discussion questions or topics, and a Works Cited list (may appear on the back of the sheet).
Think of the report as:
1. Providing a service for all in the class, since few will be able to attend more than a fraction of all the conference offers.
2. Allowing you (if you report beforehand) to organize your thoughts, so that you can prepare questions and engage meaningfully in the experience; and (if you report after) to collect your impressions and make sense of what you saw and heard.
3. Giving you a way to build on what you have read and discussed in the class—to build toward interactions with scholars in the field and also a research project of your own.

Happy snow day! I hope you are enjoying the break in your usual Monday schedule.

How did you like the two plays you read for today? What questions do they raise for you? Take a moment to note your first impressions before moving on to the more elaborate “lecture” below.

In an attempt to reproduce the contents of today’s class on Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), please read the following:

Banham, Martin, ed. “Melodrama.” In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780521434379.
Howes, Marjorie. “Melodramatic Conventions and Atlantic History in Dion Boucicault.” Éire-Ireland 46, no. 3 (2011): 84–101.
Foster, Verna A. “Meta-Melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon.” Modern Drama 59, no. 3 (2016): 285–305.

For today’s discussion, please consider this question:

How does an ethnic sensibility—one, that is, defined by categories of national origin rather than, or in addition to, race—create space for a flexible performance of racial identity in these plays?

This question arises from the ethnic presence—Boucicault’s Irishness—in two dramas that appear to play in racial binaries, white and black, but also incorporate other racial and ethnic identities as well (Native American, Yankee, Louisiana Creole). Significantly, both works seem to offer an opportunity to think creatively outside the boundaries of racial stereotyping.

The first reading, a definition and brief history of melodrama in the Cambridge Guide to Theatre, may be helpful in providing a historical context for this somewhat amorphous term. It is important to have a precise definition, as Boucicault is actively using and innovating on the form, and Jacobs-Jenkins has studied it extensively.

Note that Jacobs-Jenkins’ play begins with an epigraph from Boucicault’s “The Art of Dramatic Composition” (North American Review 126.260 (1878): 40-52) and that Verna A. Foster, in the article noted below, speaks of Jacobs-Jenkins’ appreciative reading of Boucicault’s theatrical art.

The second reading, an essay by Marjorie Howes on Boucicault’s use of melodrama in three works including The Octoroon, places him within a historical shift from “status” to “contract” socioeconomic systems in the Atlantic world.

In blending mortgage melodrama with the figure of the “tragic mulatta,” Boucicault draws on popular melodramatic plots that seem fixed in their acceptance of simple moral conflicts (heroes and villains), broad emotions and gestures, and resolutions brought about by contrived and mechanical plot structures.
Howes argues, however, for Boucicault’s innovations on hackneyed melodramatic forms. Her use of the historical argument about changing economic systems suggests that Boucicault placed these standard features of melodrama in a fluid world defined not by the property ownership and social status hierarchies of the past but by a changing transatlantic universe in which contracts signal new relationships between old orders.
The ethnic experience of migration and adaptation gives artists like Boucicault tools for rethinking outdated social structures, even as he delivers entertainment that depends on them.

Jacobs-Jenkins has the advantage of thinking critically on Boucicault’s practices and of viewing them in a 21st-century perspective. The third reading by Verna A. Foster, introduces a particularly apt term, “meta-melodrama,” to describe Jacobs-Jenkins’s strategy of dramatic adaptation: one that focuses on the audience as not simply “feeling” something (the response that Boucicault’s “sensation” melodrama aimed to evoke) but also seeing themselves feeling something—a level of self-awareness that his troubling material seems urgently to call for.

Using a frame story that brings the two playwrights directly onto the stage, Jacobs-Jenkins both “appropriates” Boucicault’s play and writes a “palimpsest” of his own, through which one may view the past through a critical lens.
This perspective allows Jacobs-Jenkins to appropriate the sensational and entertaining aspects of Boucicault’s play while also addressing its shocking historical implications and contemporary reverberations.

So that’s what I might have said to start off the discussion. Now let’s approach my starting question: How does an ethnic sensibility—one, that is, defined by categories of national origin rather than or in addition to race—create space for a flexible performance of racial identity in these plays?

In lieu of class discussion, I’d like you to read the materials above and write a response paper of whatever length suits you on some aspect of this collection of readings. That’s a lot of material, so here are some suggestions:

Select one of the plays to examine more closely and highlight a passage that seems to you an apt example of or rejoinder to one of the points in the essays above. Discuss.
Consider the “ethnic” question in relation to the relative social positions of Dion Boucicault Irish immigrant and entrepreneur, and Branden Jacob-Jenkins, African-American graduate of Princeton, NYU, and Juilliard, and 2016 MacArthur Fellow. Who has the more “authority” over his subject?
Compare the way the two authors have treated common material in presenting a specific character or scene. Alternatively, you might consider what Jacobs-Jenkins adds to his Boucicault source and how his changes reflect on the play’s meaning.
19th-century melodrama made the most of new technologies of theater and of society as well. Imagine how Boucicault produced a steamboat explosion on stage! But just as exciting to audiences would have been the use of photography for forensic analysis of a crime scene. What technologies does Jacobs-Jenkins feature? What is the effect of using new technology in one or both of the plays?

Please submit your response within 24 hours of today’s class time. I will use them to develop a brief wrap-up in class on Session 3 before we go on to discuss Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

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Ethnic Literature in America