Teaching Yamashita's Tropic of Orange

[aleph-zahir.livejournal.com]

I usually teach 19th and early 20th c. lit, but this summer I was assigned a 20th c. survey course.  Next week we'll be reading our final novel,Tropic of Orange.  I'm excited, but it's definitely uncharted territory.

Have any of you asianamlitfans taught this novel?  What approaches, strategies, or questions have you found to particularly useful?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

Students will naturally like it based on your regional geography...

have you been primarily lecturing at this point?

i kind of like to situate karen's work as the anomaly in asian american literature in lecture because of her initial novel's content and then i like to talk about japanese american literature more generally, which has tended to focus more largely on tropes of the internment, which is interesting because this novel is definitely a post-internment one, still working in that direction (a la Manzanar) but really looking at locality at place, the urban

it's really an excellent test to talk about in relation to postmodern theory (a la Jameson, Hutcheon, Eagleton, McHale, Baudrillard, Lyotard etc); that's another

a lot of possible group work activities

breaking the class up into seven groups and having each present on a character

how large is your class?

etc

[aleph-zahir.livejournal.com]

I've been doing about half and half lecture and discussion (there's about thirty students in the class). I hadn't thought about situating it in terms of internment or Japanese Am lit as a whole, but that's a really good idea. Thanks!

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I taught it once. My students didn't really find the novel humorous at all, to my dismay. They also needed a lot of background on the references to Aztec mythology, NAFTA, etc. And some had difficulty following the multiple, intersecting narratives. If I teach it again, I'd try to come up with some kind of exercise that would help students visualize the storylines, maybe working off the table of contents grid thing.

[aleph-zahir.livejournal.com]

Really? That's astounding. (Then again, my students didn't think The Crying of Lot 49 was funny, so what can you expect?)

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Well, I also think my students are alien zombies, but that's a different matter. They also didn't cry when we read Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, but maybe I'm the only one who does that. :P

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

i didn't cry after Blu's Hanging, but it is a sad novel

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

"table of contexts grid thing" = hypercontexts

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

XP

[aleph-zahir.livejournal.com]

You've been reading way too much narrative theory.

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

wait a minute, i think it's actually called THAT lol

i didn't make that up

[aleph-zahir.livejournal.com]

Oops! My bad. I lectured today and zero of my students had started reading. Bitches better be caught up by tomorrow!