Welcome
Welcome to English 223. I’m writing to you from week five of a concentrated six-week summer semester. If you have any capacity for thrill-seeking, this course is for you. It will provide a unique opportunity to experience literature like you have never before experienced it. So, buckle your seatbelt and let me share my legacy with you by giving a quick tour of my portfolio. Hold on; the ride will be over before you can exhale.


Community
One thing you’ll notice, right out of the gate, is the community experience—even if you are taking this course online. I have had some really great opportunities to share personal insights by responding to the Reading Journals posted by others in the class. And, likewise, I have learned some new and interesting insights from those who have had different life experiences than me by reading their responses to the Reading Journals that I posted. For example, in a Reading Journal I posted on Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee, I was discussing the strained relationships of the narrator and one student posted a helpful insight that I hadn’t particularly considered. He stated, “taking on assumed identities seems to be a sort of escape for him” (C.B.). You’ll have to read the book to capture the fullness of the insight, but it was right on target.


Artifacts
I've included a sampling of some of my favorite Reading Journals in the Artifacts to serve as examples for you to review (View the links to Artifacts on the sidebar).  I feel I did my best work on the books I best connected with and therefore most enjoyed reading; so you will find Journals on Tasting the Sky, by Barakat, Sisters of My Heart, by Divakaruni and Native Speaker by Lee included. I hope they will prove to be good models for your experience here. One final tip about Reading Journals: they will serve you best if you read the posted summary and then the attached Reading Journals of at least three other students. You only need to write a written response to two of them. This simple process is one way to greatly expand your horizons with the least amount of time invested. And, that was important for me balancing a full load (12 credits), a full time job and large family in a condensed semester.


Themes of Literature
At our next stop, we get to see the very core and heartbeat of the course, in my estimation. Don’t be surprised if our stop here is just a little longer than at the others. Each of us was asked to choose three themes in immigrant literature that we could study throughout the semester. We did this by looking for ways the authors of the various works might deal with the particular themes. For instance, I chose Identity, Overcoming Adversity and Displacement as my themes. The various authors had different experiences in some cases and similar experiences in others. This part of the course was particularly insightful because literature’s greatest contribution to the world, in my opinion, is its explication of human experience through the medium of storytelling. For example, from the Deconstructionist’s perspective, author of Sister of My Heart, Chitra Divakaruni, and author of Love & Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon, each express his and her struggle with identity quite differently. Divakaruni finds and expresses her twin-identity through the not-related, but Siamese-at-the-heart, Indian girls, Sudha and Anju. They are opposites in attitude and perspective, but similar in passions. Unlike Divakaruni, Hemon, through his coming-to-age narrator, struggles to find his identity, and it seems evident in the narrator’s persona in each of the stories in Love & Obstacles. In the closely related theme of displacement, we actually see some similarities in the way these two authors adjust. Lost and lonely, Hemon’s war-displaced narrator seeks to cope with his displacement by pursuing “wistful love” (back cover plug). Divakaruni’s girls cope by attempting to comfort themselves by loving their children. Finally, the theme of Overcoming Adversity is handled in both stories through the pragmatic approach to problems. Sudha, relinquishes herself to marrying her arranged mate and Hemon’s narrator drinks, writes and chases sexual encounters. A final note on themes and literary theory before moving on: choose themes that you will connect with in real life. Try placing yourself in the shoes of an immigrant who is forced, through circumstances, to leave her home, culture and language and has to adjust to a new life. Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is the best way to understand their blisters.


Collaborative Midterm
In another important stop, we have the Collaborative Midterm experience. I call it an experience because that is more accurate of an assessment than calling it an assignment. My experience on this project can probably be best understood by reading my Process Paper, also in my Artifacts. But, to summarize, my experience was that of a small child who gets separated from his parents at Disneyland. Frightening! My entire team went MIA (missing in action). I think they all conspired to drop the course at the same time and to never tell anyone, then went and had drinks at the Yardhouse and laughed about it all night. All kidding aside, I really did enjoy the experience. It presented a new and unexpected challenge; and that’s just the way real life is. It gave me an opportunity to connect with one of my themes in a personal way. I had to overcome my own kind of adversity and experience, in the milieu, perhaps, some of what our immigrant authors did. I had to do some quick and clever improvising and my entire presentation was that of my own work—not that impressive for a Collaborative Midterm, just me, myself and I. If I had to do it over again, however, I would ask to join a different team or see if the instructor would allow someone to come to my team; but hindsight is usually 20/20. You can also see my presentation titled, A New View and read my explication of Susan Thomas’ poem, New York Public Library, in the Artifacts to get a taste of what the experience was like and see the work I produced.


Course Objectives
Let’s move on; I can see your face is turning blue. Only one more stop before we conclude the tour. I’ve mentioned Artifacts a couple of times. You may be wondering what those are, exactly. They are assignments I have completed that you can access through the links provided on the right hand side of this site that will assumedly help you get a picture of the experience you will have in this class. As I’ve mentioned, you will find it consists of Reading Journals as well as my poetry explication assignment and a couple of interviews I gave; all of which will demonstrate both my understanding of an author’s choices of vocabulary, genre, symbolism and rhetorical devices and how close reading and original thinking about the works and themes I chose to examine this semester convey meaning and evoke the reader’s response to those works. Please feel free to look around and capture a snapshot of what you can expect to accomplish in this class, yourself.


Helpful Tips
Well, that concludes our tour. Thanks for staying with me. On our way out, allow me to share a couple quick insights that will serve an incoming student well: hang on and speak up! That’s right. This ride is a fast and furious one; and, our professor, Dr. Laing, has expectations. She is not one to be inequitable, but there are no entitlements in this course. She will give you a lot of room to be creative and be the best you you can be; but, don’t expect it to be easy. If you will resign yourself to finishing the course and staying engaged by asking a lot of questions, you will succeed! Use the FAQ link under the Resources link. It is a great venue, like a forum, to relay and gather important and helpful information amongst the student community. Oh, and don’t forget to comment on other student’s work. Forgetting that is a sure way to lose valuable points. It is a must! The course will be almost impossible to fail if you follow that advice. We are all learning together, so don’t get discouraged when you feel overwhelmed. Think of it as a right of passage. You won’t regret the experience or finishing your course!


Best Regards,
Scott Postma