E-C-302 Research Methodology

v Assignment paper:E-C-302 Research Methodology  

v Topic                  : Vocation of research scholar

v Student’s Name   : Gandhi Pooja S.

v Roll No                : 08

v URL                     : gandhipooja151011.blogspot.com

v Semester              : 3

v Batch                   : 2010-11

                    Submitted to,                                 

                          Dr. Dilip Barad                                           

                       Department of English              

                        Bhavnagar University

Ø Vocation of research scholar:

                         Literary scholar and the critics are engaged in a common pursuit, so that the findings of one are indispensable to the work of the other. Some professional students of literature prefer to regard themselves primarily as critics, some as scholars; but the dichotomy between the two is far more apparent than real, and every good student of literature is constantly combining the two roles, often without knowing it.

                          The difference is mainly one of emphasis. The critic’s business is primarily with the literary work itself- with its structure, style, and content of ideas. Scholars, on the other hand, are more concerned with the facts attending its genesis and subsequent history. Believing that every work of art must be seen from without as well as from within, they seek to illuminate it from every conceivable angle, to make it as intelligible as possible by the uncovering and application of data residing outside itself.

                         Critic is more focus on what Shakespeare said. For the scholar history of the literature is more important. Scholar can imagine what the poet imagine and also think like the critic thinks with emotion and intellect. Even critic can think with image of scholar (Reader response theory). Critic’s primary concern is the text and scholar’s primary concern is genesis and history.

According to the late scholar-critic George Whalley:

“No true scholar can lack critical acumen; and the scholar’s eye is rather like the poet’s- not, to be sure, “in a fine frenzy rolling,” but at least looking for something as yet unknown which it knows it will find,……………………………… without scholarship the criticism of a poem may easily become a free fantasia on a non-existent theme.”

                        It is the product of an individual human being’s imagination and intellectual; therefore, we must know all we can about the author. Sanite- Beuve’s critical axiom tel arbre, tel fruit (“like the tree, like the fruit”) is a bland oversimplification, to be sure, but the fact remains that behind the book is a man or woman whose character and experience cannot be overlooked in any effort to establish what the book really says. The quality of the imagination, the genetic and psychological factors that shaped a writer’s personality and determined the atmosphere of his or her inner being, the experiences, large and small, that fed the store from which such an artist in words drew the substance of at: all these must be sought, examined, and weighed if we are to comprehend the meaning of a text.

                        Moreover, no one writes in a vacuum. Whatever private influences are involved, authors, whether conformists or rebels, are the products of time and place, their mental set fatefully determined by the social and cultural environment. We must understand the manifold socially derived attitudes- the morality, the myths, the assumptions, the biases- that it reflects or embraces. And because, in the overwhelming majority of instances, it was written not for its author’s private self alone but for a specific contemporary audience and only incidentally for us, we must try to find out precisely how the mingled ideas of that earlier world affected the text’s shape and content. Most especially is it necessary to reconstruct the then prevailed?

                        Literary research, then, is devoted, for one thing, to the enlightenment of criticism- which may or may not take advantage of the proffered information. It seeks to illuminate the work of the art as it really is, and- the difference may be considerable- as it was to its first audiences; equally, it tries to see the writer as he really was, his cultural heritage and the people for whom he wrote as they really were. But while this is unquestionably its major purpose, it has at least one other important function. Literary history constitutes one of the strands of which the history of civilization itself is woven. Like its sister disciplines of musicology and art history, it finds its material in the vast array of  records we have inherited of the imaginative side of human experience- in its case, the representation in language of that experience. Literature preserves for us, for example, the poignance of the medieval aspiration toward Heaven though held down by mortal splendors that excitement of the Renaissance awareness of the splendors that environ Western mankind in the here and now; the cool and candid re-estimate of the world and the human self that the eighteenth century made under the auspices of revolutionary science and skeptical philosophy; and the spiritual chiaroscuro of wasteland and earthly paradise, the bewildering series of shocks and recoveries, to which modern society has been subjected in the past two centuries. Literature, then, is an eloquent artistic document, infinitely varied, of mankind’s journey: the autobiography of race’s soul. 

                       There are the unmeasurable but intensely real personal satisfactions that literary research affords men and women of a certain temperament: the sheer joy of finding out things that have previously been unknown and thus of increasing, if but by a few grains, the aggregate of human knowledge. One of us has sought to describe the sources and qualities of this pleasure in earlier books, and they will occasionally appear again in the following chapters. The genuine scholar is impelled by a deeply ingrained curiosity, an undeniable urge to learn as well as to teach.

                       As a consequence of this recent dramatic expansion of the scope of literary interest, it is certain that, given a fair degree of imagination, originally of approach, solidity of learning, and the wish and the will to see works of literary art and their creators from new perspectives, everyone called to the profession will discover amply rewarding projects. In America during the half century or so, most literary research has been done by academic people, and publishing the results of research has provided the traditional boost up the professional ladder. Unfortunately, the notorious cliché “publish or perish” still describes the attitude of many college and university administrators charged with deciding the fate of young untenured faculty members. Any external pressure to write scholarly books and articles is pernicious not only because it may well divert a career from its natural course, thus causing good deal of personal unhappiness, but because scholarship performed under duress is seldom very good scholarship. Indeed, t is to the “publish or perish” mentality that we can attribute the present bloated condition of the annual bibliographies and appearance, in the proliferating journals, of a lamentable amount of incompetent, pretentions, or trivial writing that should have been intercepted somewhere between the typewriter or personal computer and the press.

                      It may well be that, as Dr. Johnson held, “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”; if so, the history of literary scholarship at its best is populated with amiable blockheads. What are the chief qualities of mind and temperament that go to make up a successful and happy scholar? The thought occurs that the ideally equipped literary scholar should have come to his or her profession after serving a practical apprenticeship in one or the other of two occupations: law and journalism. The practice of law requires a thorough command of the principles of evidence, a knowledge of how to make one’s efficient way through the accumulated “literature” on a subject (in legal terms, the statutes and decisions applying to a given case), and a devotion both to accuracy and to detail. It was perhaps no accident that James Boswell himself, who often would “run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly,” was a lawyer by profession. Journalism, more specifically the work of the investigative reporter, also calls for resourcefulness- knowing where to go for one’s information and how to obtain it, the ability to recognize and follow up leads, and tenacity in pursuit of the facts. Both professions, moreover, require organization skill, the ability to put facts together in a pattern that is clear and, if controversy is involved, persuasive.

                       In the second place, researchers must have a vivid sense of history: the ability to cast themselves back into another age. They must be able to adjust their intellectual sights and imaginative responses to the systems of thought and the social and cultural atmosphere that prevailed in fourteenth- century England or early twentieth century America. It is pithily embodied in a proverb that H.L. Mencken attributes to the Japanese: “Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass’s back.” One can be a researcher, full of knowledge, without also being a scholar. Research is the means scholarship the end; research is an occupation, scholarship is a habit of mind and a way of life. Scholars are more than researchers, for while they may be gifted in the discovery and assessment of facts, they are, besides, persons of broad and luminous learning. They have both the wisdom and the knowledge that enable them to put facts in their place- in two senses.

v Conclusion:

                      John Livingston Lowes, spoken in1933 but really dateless:

“Humane scholarship…… moves and must move within two worlds at once- the world of scientific method and the world, in whatever degree, of creative art…………………………………. . And that end is, in the broadest sense of the world, interpretation- the interpretation, in the light of all that our researches can reveal, of the literature which is our professional concern.”

   

   

E-C-301 The Modernist Literature

v Assignment paper:E-C-301 The Modernist Literature  

v Topic                  : Stream of Consciousness

                                           In

                                “To the Lighthouse” 

v Student’s Name   : Gandhi Pooja S.

v Roll No                : 08

v URL                     : gandhipooja151011.blogspot.com

v Semester              : 3

v Batch                   : 2010-11

                    Submitted to,                                 

                          Dr. Dilip Barad                                           

                       Department of English              

                        Bhavnagar University

Ø Stream of Consciousness in “To the Lighthouse” 

v Introduction:

                      Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 to Sir Leslie Stephen, a Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer, and scholar and Julia pattle Stephen. Woolf struggled to meet the standards set by her father’s learning and her mother’s social graces until the finally found peace with them in writing ‘To the Lighthouse’.

                    As a young woman Woolf wrote for the prestigious ‘Times Literary supplement’ and as an adult she quickly found herself at the center of England’s most important literary community know as the “Bloomsbury group” after the section of London in which its members lived, this group of writers, artists, and philosophers emphasized nonconformity, aesthetic pleasure and intellectual freedom. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912. On March 28, 1941, she wrote her husband a note stating that she did not wish to spoil his life by going mad, she then drowned herself in the River Ouse.

                  In describing her next novel ‘To the Lighthouse’ Woolf used the language of psychoanalysis. She wrote,

             “I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotions. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

v Virginia Woolf’s works:

‘The Voyage Out’ (1913)

‘Jacob’s Room’ (1922)

‘Mrs. Dalloway’ (1925)

‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927)

‘Orlando’ (1928)

‘The waves’ (1931)

‘The years’ (1937)

‘Between the Acts’ (1941)

Essays:-

‘A room of one’s Own’

‘Three Guineas’ (1938)

v What is ‘streams of consciousness’?

                Stream of consciousness was a phrase used by William James in his principles of psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. Long passages of introspection, in which the narrator records in detail what passes through a character’s awareness. Stream of consciousness is the name applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertake to reproduce, without a narrator’s intervention , the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character’s mental process in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half- conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations.

               Some critics use ‘streams of consciousness interchangeably with use of term ‘interior monologue’. It is useful however to follow the usage of critics who has the former as the inclusive term, denoting all the diverse means employed by authors to communicate the inclusive state.

v The stream of consciousness novel:  its causes:

           The rise of “The Stream of Conscious Novel”, in the early twenties is but a reflection of the increasing inwardness of life consequent upon the break-down of accepted values with the turn of the century, a process which was accelerated by the outbreak of the world war. Giving an the rise of the psychology novel, David Daiche writes,

           Two other factors in addition to the breakdown of a public sense of signification help to produce what we have called the modern novel. One is the new concept of time as continues flow, rather the ‘conscious’ is only a very small part of the human psyche or soul.

v Rejection of Traditional Technique by Virginia Woolf:

             Mrs. Woolf’s concern in writing novels was not merely to narrate a story as the older novelists did, but to discover and record life as the people feel who live it. Hence it is she rejected the conventional technique of narration and adopted a new technique more suited to her purposes.

            It is this reason that in ‘To the Lighthouse’ she has not told a story, I the sense of a series of events, and has concentrated on a small number f characters, whose nature and feelings are represented to us largely through their interior monologues. She has used the stream of consciousness technique, but she has not used in consistently throughout. The interior monologues of the different characters are, no doubt, given, but the novelist, the central intelligence, is also constantly busy, organizing the material and illuminating it by frequent comments.

v Selection and organization of material:

            There is no random presentation of material, rather the central intelligence is ever at work organizing it and commenting upon it. The use of the third person and of conventional sentence structure gives less the impression of the impact of the immediate moment than of the process of reflection- the way memory and association are continually being called up. The novel as a whole is reflective rather than spontaneous and the obvious selection by the author focuses our attention on the idea of the working of the mind, which is more interesting than a more naturalistic imitation of its confused processes.

v The stream of consciousness as a technique:

              Virginia Woolf’s characters are not directly described; she does not follow the traditional method of set description. There is no summing up of her men and women no formulae covering up their personality. Woolf’s characters rarely reveal themselves by what they say or do. Rather,

“We derive our impression of other characters in the novel. Her method is cumulative and her characters cannot be taken out of the contact and judged in isolation.”

             This is done by the use of the stream of consciousness technique. The personality of a character is built up not all at once, but gradual step by step, by nothing the impact on his soul of significance scenes and moments both past and present. A character is further rounded up by nothing. In this way characters are made memorable and visualized characters like Mrs.ramsay live in the mind and enlarge our capacity for imaginative sympathy.

            The writer effaces herself more and more, the illusion of the all-seeing eye of the novelist is replaced by the illusion that we are seeing by glimpses, with our own imperfect vision. In this way we see much more than in the conventional novel. Human beings arose in each other profound and valued feelings, and sum of such feelings in different personages gives a vivid account of their personalities. They throw light on each other.

v Suspense and curiosity:

            “To the Lighthouse” begins by taking us into the middle of a scene; Mrs.ramsay opening remark is the answer to an unstated question, which we have to supply by picking up clues from what follows. The reader’s natural curiosity thus becomes involved. We wonder who these people are, what they are taking about and so on. As we read on, prompted by this desire to know, we begin to recognize a pattern in the narrative at the same time as we assimilate names, facts, ideas. This unobtrusive quality and the novelist’s care to make everything seem natural, artfully concern the fact that this opening is doing several things at once.

v The pattern : Conversation and Reaction:

         Then, too, the pattern begins to establish itself; the pattern, that is, of conversation and reaction, of the actual words in the first person and present tense, and the reflections of the characters in the third person and the past tense. The opening conversation consists of only eight short- remarks of a normal, even trivial, kind, but from the beginning we are made aware that the surface of normal, human relationships conceals a mass of tangled feelings and associations and that these feelings can be strong and passionate, though they are concealed.

v The Time- Scheme:

         It is by means of this combination of the conversation that is actually happening and the connected thoughts that may range over any event that a time-scheme is also established, in the sense of the present moment seen in relationship to the past, which is continually woven in with the present in the minds of most people.

v Stream of consciousness in “To the Lighthouse”:

         “To the Lighthouse” is a search for control, for something unifying; in a world where nature is apparently hostile and threating. First, Mrs.ramsay, when thinking of her eight children is afraid that they should grow up because they should grow up because they will only find solitude, hostility, and injustice in the world.

         In the second part of the book, “Time passes” in which the faces of nature are seen in action and which surely represents the authoress view of the nature of things, Virginia Woolf puts this common aim poetically.

“In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds forever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation...............”

“Single, hand, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure……………”

        Yet hostile nature was in the combining, creating in relation to the lives of those that her (Mrs.ramsay) powers lay and all the while house is decaying as the result of the hostile forces of nature.

“Tortoise shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the window pune, poppies showed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn………….....sturdy trees and throned briars which made the whole room green in summer.”

v Conclusion:

          Mrs. Woolf has cleverly avoided the drawbacks of the stream of consciousness novel, and given form and coherence to her material. She is not haphazard and incoherent like the other “stream of consciousness” novelists. Through her style she conveys a sense of amazing richness and complexity of life.    

   

             

   

         

Paper-EE-205(B) Types of cultural studies:‘American Multiculturalism’

Assignment Paper   : EE-205(B)

    Topic                     : Types of cultural studies:

                                        ‘American Multiculturalism’

O      Student’s Name   : Gandhi Pooja S.

    Roll No                  : 09

·         URL                    : gandhipooja151011.blogspot.com

    Semester                : 2

O      Batch                    : 2010-11

                                                                          

              Submitted to,                                                          

              Dr. Dilip Barad,                                                      

              Department of English                       

              Bhavnagar University

v Introduction:

ü What is cultural studies?

v Patrick Brantlinger-

                 Cultural studies is not “a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda”, but a “loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions”.

There are five types of cultural studies:

1)    British cultural Materialism

2)    New Historicism

3)    American Multiculturalism

4)    Postmodernism and popular culture

5)    Postcolonial studies.

v American Multiculturalism:

                            In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide attention. The Civil Act had passed in 1964, and the black lash was well under way in 1965: murders and other atrocities attention, the civil rights march from Selma o Montgomery. President Lyndon Johnson signed the voting Rights Act. The “long, hot summer” of 1966 saw violent insurrections in Newark, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, sun Francisco the very television seemed ablaze. The Black Panther party was founded. James Meredith, the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, was wondered by a white segregationist, interracial marriage was still illegal in many states.

                            Nearly a half century later, evolving identities of racial and ethnic groups have not only claimed a place in the main stream of American life, but have challenged the very nation of “race”, more and more seen by social scientific relevance. In fact, a 1972, Harvard University study by the geneticist Richard Lewontin found that most genetic differences were with within racial groups, not between them. Administrators of the 2000 census faced multiracial people die not identify with any of them.

                            Henry Louis Gates, Jr. uses the word “race” only in quotation marks, for it “pretends to be an objective term of classification”, but it is a “dangerous type ……..of ultimate, irreducible difference  between culture, linguistic groups or adherents of specific belief systems which more often than not also have fundamentally opposed  economic interests. Without biological criteria “race” is arbitury: “yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. “Race” is still a critical feature of American life, full of contradictions and ambiguities; it is at once the greatest source of cultural development in America.

v Four parts of American Multiculturalism:

1)    African American Writers

2)    Latina/o Writers

3)    Americans Indian Literatures

4)    Asian American Writers

1)    African American Writers:

                     African American studies are widely pursued in American literary criticism, from the recovery of eighteenth century poets such as Phillis Wheatley to the experimental novels of Toni Morrison. In ‘Shadow and Act (1964) novelist Ralph Ellison argued that any “viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole.”

                     African American writing often displays a folkloric conception humankind; “double consciousness” as W.E.B. DuBo is called, it arising from bicultural identity; irony, parody, tragedy, a bitter comedy in negotiating this ambivalence; a naturalistic focus on survival, as in language games like “living”, “sounding” and rapping. These practices symbolically characterize “the group’s attempts to humanize the world”, as Ellison puts it.  Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who wished to distance themselves from such “roots” and embrace the new international forms available in literary modernism?

                      Bernard Bell reviews some primary features of African American writing and compares value systems:

         Traditional White American values emanate from a providential vision of history and of Euro-Americans………………… pursuit of social justice.

                       Some of the most widely taught writes of the earlier periods include-

Harriet E. Wilson, whose “Our Nig: or sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two- story White House, North (1859).” Linda Brent, author of ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’ (1960), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, author of ‘Iola Leroy’; or ‘Shadows Uplifted’ (1892).

                        The Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937) signaled a tremendous upsurge in black culture, with an especial interest in primitivist art. The so-called New Negroes, whom Hustorn sarcastically dubbed the “Niggerati”, celebrated black culture. Naturalist author Richard Wright Furiously attacked white American society at the start of the Civil Rights movement in works such as ‘Native Son’(1938), and ‘Black Boy’ (1945). Ralph Ellison was influenced by Naturalism but even more by African American traditions such as the Trickster, jazz and also connect his reading in the European and American traditions of Conrad, Eliot and Faulkner, as he discuss at length in the preface to ‘Invisible Man’(1949).

                         Today, Toni Morrison shows irritation when she is constantly discussed as a ‘Black Wright’ instead of merely a writer. Nevertheless, Morrison’s works such as ‘The Bluest Eye’ (1970), ‘Song of Solomon’ (1977), and ‘Beloved’ (1987) give readers riveting insights into the painful lives of her black protagonists as they confront society.

2)     Latina/o Writers:

                         Latina/o means Hispanic, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Nuyori Can Chicano or maybe Huichol or Maya. “Latina/o” to indicate a broad sense of ethnicity among Spanish-speaking people in the United States. Mexican Americans are the largest and most influential group of Latina/o ethnicities in the United States.

                           Though there is of course, no one culture that can accurately be described as Latina/o, the diversity of Spanish-speaking people with different origins, nationalities, religions, skin colors, class identifications, politics, and varying names for themselves has an enormous impact upon ‘American’ culture since its beginnings. These characteristics are now rapidly entering the mainstream of everyday life, so that ‘American Literature’ and ‘American Studies’ are now referred to as ‘Literatures of the Americas’ or ‘studies of the Americas.’

                          History of the indigenous cultures of the New World is punctuated by conquests by Indian nations; European countries, especially Spain, Portugal, France, and England; then by the United States. Over time, there emerged in former Spanish possessions a mestizo literary culture in addition to the colonial and native cultures.

                          “Code-switching” is a border phenomenon studied by linguists. Speakers who code- switches move back and forth between Spanish and English, for instance, or resort to the ‘spanglish’ of border towns; linguists note why and when certain words are uttered in one language or another. They note that among code-switchers words that have to do with home or family or church are always in Spanish whereas more institutional terms especially relating to authority are in English. Limitation, or ‘between-ness’ is characteristic of postmodern experience but also has special connotation for Latina/os.

                             The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s meant renewed Mexican American political awareness and artistic production. Rudolf Anaya’s ‘Bless Me, Ultima (1973).perhaps the best-known Latina novel, focuses on the impact of World War-II on a small community in New Mexico. Two other key contributors to Latino fiction are Oscar Zeta Acosta, author of ‘The Revolt of the cockroach people’, (1973) and Richard Rodriguez, author of the memoir Hunger of Memory(1981), and more recently a commentator on PBS’s ‘News Hour’ with ‘Jim Lehrer’.

3)    American Indian Literatures (Red-Indians):

                         A word on names: ‘Native American’ seems to be the term prepared by most academics and many tribal members, who find the term ‘Indian’ a misnomer and stereotype as in ‘Cowboys and Indians’ or ‘Indian giver’ that helped whites wrest the continent away from indigenous people. ‘Native American’, as demonstrated in the names of such organization for the study of American Indian Literatures, as Alan R. Velie notes.

                        Two types of Indian literature have evolved as fields of study. Traditional Indian literature includes tales, songs and oratory that have existed on the North American continent for centuries, composed in tribal languages and performed for tribal audiences, such as the widely studied Winnebago Trickter cycle. Today, traditional literatures are composed in English as well. Mainstream Indian literature refers to works written by Indians in English in the traditional genres of fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Traditional literature was and is oral; because the Indian tribes did not have written languages, European newcomers assumed they had no literature, but as Velie observers, this would be like assuming that the Greeks of the ‘Iliad’ and the Odyssey had no literature either. Far from the stereotype of the mute Indian, American Indians created the first American literatures.

                          Traditional Indian literature is not especially accessible for the average reader, and it is not easy to translate from Cherokee into English. Contextual frames do not translate well, nor does the oral/ per formative/ sacred function of traditional literature. Furthermore, Indians do not separate literature from everyday life as a special category to be enjoyed leisure time.

                         All members of the tribe listen to songs and chants with no distinction between high and low culture. A tribe’s myths and stories are designed to perpetuate their heritage and instruct the young, cure illnesses, ensure victory in battle, or secure fertile fields. It is a literature that is practical.

                         Yet it was not until the 1960s that the American reading public at large became aware of works by American Indian writers, especially after the publication of Kiowa writer M. Scott Momaday’s ‘House Made of Dawn (1968)’, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, ‘The Way to Rainy Mountain’(1969), beginning a renaissance of Indian fiction and poetry. Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo and others became major literary figures, marking little-known but historically rich sections of the country speak of their Indian past and present. Erdrich’s novels ‘Love Medicine’(1984), ‘The Beet Queen’(1986), and ‘Tracks’(1988) follow the fortunes of several North Dakota Indian families in an epic unsparing in its satiric revelations of their venality, libidinousness, and grotesquerie. From her competing narrators emerges a unified story of a community under siege by the outside world.

                          Creek Indian Joy Harjo transforms traditional Indian poetic cadences into the hypnotic poetry of she had some Horses(1983), where her lyrics tell ‘the fantastic and terrible story of our survival’ through metaphors of landscape and the body.

                          For American Indians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro-Americans.

4)    Asian American Writers:

                       Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United States, addressing the experience of living in a society that views them as alien. Asian immigrants were denied citizenship as late as the 1950s.

                        Edward Said has written of ‘orientalism’ or the tendency to objectify and exoticize Asians, and their work has sought to respond to such stereotyping. Asian American Writers include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Polynesian, and many other peoples of Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the pacific. These cultures present a be wilding array of languages, religions, social structures, and skin colors, and so the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina/o or American Indian. Furthermore, some Asian American writers are relatively new arrivals in the United States, while others trace their American forebears for generations, as Mexican Americans do. Names can get tricky here too: people with the same record of residence and family in the United States might call themselves Chinese American, Amer-Asian, or none of the above. In Hawaii the important distinction is not so much ethnicity as being ‘local’ versus ‘haole’. (White)

                          Asian American literature can be said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century, primarily with autobiographical ‘paper son’ stories and ‘confessions’. Paper son stories were carefully fabricated for Chinese immigrant men to make the authorities believe that their new world sponsors were really their fathers. Each tale had to provide consistent information on details of their factious village life together.

                          Confessions were elicited from Chinese women recued by missionaries from prostitution in California’s booming mining towns and migrants labor camps. A later form of this was the ‘picture-bride’ story, written by Asian woman seeking American husbands.

                        Asian American autobiography inherited these descriptive strategies, as Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) illustrates. This book at first caused confusion in the Chinese American literary community: was it a subtle critique of its narrator or a unapologetic description of what it feels like for her tom grow up a Chinese American Woman?

                     Chinese woman make up the largest and most influential group of Asian American women, they have produced an astonishing array of literary works, far outdistancing Asian men. The first to become known in the West tended to be daughters of diplomats or scholars or these educated in Western mission schools; two Eurasian sisters, Edith and Winnifred Easton, were typical. They emigrated with their parents to be United States, and while Edith published stories of realistic Chinese people in ‘Mrs. Spring Fragrance’ (1912), Winnifred who adopted people (Japanese) pen name ‘Onoto Watanna’, was the author of ‘Japanese’ novels of a highly sentimentalized nature, full of moonlit bamboo groves, Cherry blossoms, and doll like heroine in delicate kimonos. A second family of sisters became popular just before World War-II: Adept, Anor, and Meimei Lin, whose best-known work was their reminiscene ‘Dawn over Chunking’ (1941).

                         More recently Amy Tan is perhaps best known Her ‘Joy Luck Club’ (1989) is still a popular read and was made into a successful film. Tan traces the lives of four Chinese women immigrants starting in 1949, when they form their mah-jongg club and swap stories of life in Chinese; these mothers ‘vignettes alternate with their daughters’ stories.

v Conclusion:

                           Asian American studies has been focused on writers from Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, including Hawaiian writers Carolyn Lei- lanilau, author of ‘ono one Girl’s Hula’ (1997), Lois-Ann Yamana Ka, author of ‘Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1997), Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ (1883).