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Proposed Paper Topic, Two Ideas
March 2, 2015 | 2 Comments
Hi. My research interests are on questions of Asian American Studies and gender and sexuality. I have two paper topics that I’ve been thinking about, but don’t know how to approach and narrow down:
1. The build grison. The coming of age narrative is often considered the trope in Asian American literature. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior further raises questions around gender and brings forth controversies in Asian American literary community. Written in a collection of stories, Woman Warrior is marketed as an autobiography when it first published in 1975. Readers are expected to link the narrator, whose name is never revealed, with the writer, Maxine. It won the National Book Critics Award and is one of the first books written by an Asian American author to be accepted in an American literary canon. It isn’t until the later edition, in 1989, that the book is labeled fiction. I’m interested in using Woman Warrior as a primary text to explore questions around genre and how that affects the way readers perceive information sharing. Does simply labeling a piece of writing as autobiography or memoir gives the work more credibility? How are Asian American identities formed through writing? What kind of meanings can be extrapolated by entwining fiction and nonfiction elements?
2. Children’s literature. This idea stems from a paper I wrote last semester in my Critical Childhood and Youth Theory class, in which I did a literary analysis on the relationship between Lois Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging and the role of children’s voice, followed by an article I came across, “Fixing the Female Asian American Writer Blind Spot” by Celeste Ng. I started thinking about representations in Children’s Literature. More specifically, how do characters in children’s lit embody and perform racial identities, and how do these identities shape the reader’s (the child) reflection on the self? Does having an Asian American writer make the work Asian American (Children’s) Literature? How does the role of “voice” come into play when it’s an Asian American adult writing about Asian American children for children?
– Maple
Comments
2 Comments so far
Your Maxine Hong Kingston book seems to relate the most to ‘oversharing.’ Perhaps you can write a paper about how the reception of her work upset mainstream American sensibilities. Due to the fact that her book is entitled Woman Warrior, I’d imagine that that book would upset those sensibilities more than the other ones you mentioned.
I agree with John Paul. There is so much in Maxine Hong Kingston’s work about family secrets/ revelation/ taboo etc. The second topic is genuinely interesting, and if you ever wanted to pursue it as a Master’s Thesis I would be happy to work with you on it! But for this class, the first topic is very promising…I would push for some kind of focus on autobiography and personal revelation…