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Type of Resource

August 28, 2006

Maria Full of Grace (Maria llena eres de gracia) (2004)

August 28th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, Lesson Plans, English 104A, Latino / Latina American, Film

maria-full-of-grace.jpgWinner of the Dramatic Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Maria Full of Grace is one young woman’s journey from a small Colombian town to the streets of New York. A bright, spirited 17-year old, Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) lives with three generations of her family in a cramped house in rural Colombia and works stripping thorns from flowers in a rose plantation. The offer of a lucrative job involving travel—in fact, becoming a drug “mule”—changes the course of her life. Far from the uneventful trip she is promised, Maria is transported into the risky and ruthless world of international drug trafficking. Her mission becomes one of determination and survival and she finally emerges with the grace that will carry her forward into a new life. Directed by Joshua Marston. In Spanish, with English sub-titles. An HBO films / Fine Line Features release.

From: “Synopsis,” HBO Films / Fine Line Features. http://www.mariafullofgrace.com/index.html (Read the article)

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104A Course Syllabus

August 28th 2006 Posted to Syllabi, English 104A

This is a link to a course syllabus for English 104A, American Literature from 1900 to present. Designed by Professor Yunte Huang, this course is a survey of twentieth-century American literature with emphases on pluralism, bilingualism, migration, translation, media, and avant-gardism. It presents a picture of American literature rooted in the translocal and translingual, a literature that is not confined to national, cultural, or linguistic boundaries.

Yunte Huang’s 104A Syllabus

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August 27, 2006

Philip Kan Gotanda’s The Wash

August 27th 2006 Posted to UCSB Courses, English 50, Asian American, Film

the-wash.jpgPhilip Kan Gotanda’s play The Wash tells the story of a newly-separated Nisei couple, Nobu and Masi, and their individual and collective struggles with their traditional past. While Masi is able to move on and begins dating the widower Sadao, Nobu is forced to confront his traumatic memories of the internment camps. The Wash was first performed as a play in 1985. Gotanda then wrote the screenplay for the 1988 independent film version.

In teaching this text as part of a course on Asian American literature, it is useful to present both versions and ask the students to consider the differences and benefits of each version. The following discussion questions were designed to follow a two-part assignment in which students were asked to read the play and view the film. (Read the article)

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August 26, 2006

Between the Lines Documentary

August 26th 2006 Posted to UCSB Courses, English 50, Asian American, Film

between.jpgBetween the Lines is a 60-minute documentary film featuring interviews with over fifteen Asian-Pacific-American women Poets. This 2001 film by Yunah Hong is organized around topics such as Immigration, Language, Memory, Family, Spirituality, Reaching Out, and What it Means to Write. Each segment contains poetry readings as well as candid testimonials from the poets on subjects such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and aesthetics. The documentary combines archival images with artistic cinematography to lend a cohesive visual interpretation to each poet’s words. Poets featured in the film include (among others) Shirley Lim, Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, Mitsuye Yamada, Myung Kim, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Meena Alexander, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Barbara-Michelle Tran, Patricia Ikeda, Lori Tsang, and Kimiko Hahn. The film was screened at the Chicago Asian American Film Festival, the Toronto International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Not Hollywood: A Feminist Film Festival, Vermont Women’s Film Festival, and Seoul Women’s Film Festival. It won the CINE Golden Eagle Award in Non-Broadcast. For more information on this film and its distribution, visit Women Make Movies. (Read the article)

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August 24, 2006

Writing 2 Syllabus

August 24th 2006 Posted to Syllabi, Writing 2

This is a sample Writing 2 Syllabus, designed and taught by Eric Martinsen. Writing 2 is the only course required of all undergraduates at UCSB. It not only provides students with a fundamental understanding of academic writing but also helps them with their reading and critical thinking skills. The course addresses the differences in reading, writing, and critical thinking among the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. This year, Writing 2 classes will be using a new textbook, Writing About the World, edited by Susan McLeod, John Jarvis and Shelley Spear. This book provides a wealth of primary source material while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of multiple perspectives as well as racial and cultural diversity. Eric Martinsen’s unit on “Indigenous Identity in Film” is an example of how issues of race can be integrated into a Writing 2 course.

Eric Martinson’s Writing 2 Syllabus

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August 22, 2006

Lesson Plan: “Lullaby” by Leslie Marmon Silko

August 22nd 2006 Posted to Lesson Plans, English 104A, Native American, Literature

Background:

storyteller_2.jpg“Lullaby” is a short story from Silko’s 1981 novel Storyteller. As Linda Krumholtz writes,

“Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller is a collection of stories that is also a highly self-conscious consideration of the process of storytelling, an exploration into the ways the Laguna Pueblo society creates meaning and, subsequently, the ways cultures in general create meaning. Storyteller is a distinctively ‘readerly’ text: the many stories, poems, and photographs are gathered into an apparently random ‘scrapbook’ form, and it is left to the reader to construct connections between them. Storyteller is also a multicultural or cross-cultural text in which European-style short stories and traditional Laguna stories, ‘realistic’ fictional characters, traditional characters (such as Yellow Woman, Coyote, and Spiderwoman), and Silko’s family members are all brought together… (Read the article)

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Leslie Marmon Silko

August 22nd 2006 Posted to English 104A, Native American, Biography

“It’ssilkolesliemarmon.jpg stories that make this a community,” Leslie Marmon Silko has remarked about the Native American world of the Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, in which she grew up, and in five books—Laguna Women (1974), Ceremony (1977), Storyteller (1981), Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Yellow Woman (1993)—she has told and retold the tales that, she believes, make her people who they are. Of mixed Native American, Mexican, and Caucasian descent, Leslie Marmon attended Bureau of Indian Affairs schools at Laguna until entering high school, then studied at the University of New Mexico and later matriculated in law school before deciding to do graduate work in English and devote herself to a literary career. Divorced from John Silko, she has taught at Navajo Community College in Arizona and at the University of New Mexico, is the mother of two sons, and has been the recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Her ceremonial impulse to tell stories that are both self-defining and celebratory of her community has issued in an art that employs many forms: poetry, short stories, legendary tales, a novel, and most recently, film scripts.

From: The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. 2nd Ed. New York: Norton & Co., 1985. 2327-8 (Read the article)

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August 21, 2006

Langston Hughes

August 21st 2006 Posted to English 104A, African American, Biography

A prohughes3.jpglific poet, novelist, essayist and playwright, James Langston Hughes was a seminal figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a period during the 1920s of unprecedented artistic and intellectual achievement among black Americans. Hughes integrated the rhythm and mood of jazz and blues music into his work and used colloquial language to reflect working-class African American culture. His often-bestowed title of the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” reflects the extent to which Hughes’ career both shaped and was shaped by the music, art and lifestyle of black Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s. Unlike many of his fellow Harlem Renaissance writers, Hughes continued to write into the 1950’s. He died in New York City May 22, 1967. (Read the article)

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August 18, 2006

Gertrude Stein

August 18th 2006 Posted to English 104A, Biography

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an avant-garde German-American poet, playwrstein-1935.jpgight, feminist and avid art collector. In the 1920’s her salon at 24 Rue de Fleurus in Paris became a meeting place for artists and expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and Guillaume Apollinaire. She wrote her self-proclaimed masterpiece, the 1000-page The Making of Americans, from 1906 to 1911, but it wasn’t published until 1925. This novel loosely follows the history of an immigrant family over several generations. Raised in German-American family herself, Stein offers a unique perspective on what it means to be an American while simultaneously pushing the rules of English grammar and the form of the novel to their limits. (Read the article)

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Lesson Plan: Angel Island Poems

August 18th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, Lesson Plans, English 104A, English 50, Asian American

angel-island-detainees-web.jpgThe following are some questions about the Angel Island poems that an instructor or TA could use to prompt class discussion. One approach I recommend is to have students form small groups and come up with answers which they then share with the class. Alternatively, you could focus one whole class around one of these questions. For example, I ran a 45 minute class discussion on the “Line between graffiti and art” question by bringing in photocopies of images from the graffiti websites and getting students to debate whether or not they thought those images were art. (Read the article)

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