Ethnic Literature in America

A Brief History of Literature in the Western Canon

Renaissance Humanism

1. Diminishing power of church
2. Expanded global exploration and markets
3. Increased literacy, cosmopolitanism, discovery of ancient world literatures
4. Emerging notions of character as agency within an ethical and political sphere

Enlightenment and Romanticism

1. Rise of capitalism, industrialization, and urban concentration
2. Age of revolution—overthrow of monarchy, church, class elites
3. Re-centering of self in an age of increasingly empirical science and materialism
4. Focus on character as democratic, alternative (to rational systems, including markets), entrepreneurial, or transcendental (a new religion of the self)

Modernism

1. End of global empire, beginning of global warfare
2. Skepticism about human agency
3. Concern with systems—political, economic, ideological, linguistic—that render older concepts of character untenable
4. Distrust of totalitarian regimes of thought or action

Postmodernism (posthumanism) and the Information Age

1. Breakdown of national boundaries and controlled systems of information—rise of global markets and societies
2. Rejection of authorship as privilege—recovery of forgotten or oppressed voices
3. Rethinking of identity as a nexus of markers—race, religion, nationality or ethnicity, gender, sexuality—that compete with older concepts of character

Literary Foci in an Ethnic Context

Questions (from syllabus): How has ethnic writing changed American culture and renovated forms of literary expression? What are the varieties and nuances of what we might call an ethnic subjectivity? What could it mean to harbor fugitives within the self: transgressive thoughts or a “foreign” identity? And what is the future of “ethnic” literature in a global space?

Literary Evidence

1. Character –how do these authors imagine “character” in new ethnic literary forms?
2. Plot—how do traditional plots from the Western canon—the quest (migration), bildungsroman (coming of age), and odyssey (return home)—serve new ethnic narratives?
3. Narrator, Point of View—Who has authority to tell the story? How is that authority defined?
4. Language—What are the tongues, idioms, and accents of an ethnic sensibility?