Week 4 Reading Thoughts

  1. I took an English class summer quarter that was based around seeing different cultures through their short stories.  Some of the authors had immigrated from and to different places, and lot of the readings this week vividly reminded me of that class.  You begin reading pieces of literature written in different cultural settings and you expect, on some level, that what you're going to read is going to be somehow alien, and focus on the differences that culture has from your own.  But, of course, that isn't really what happens.  As one of the readings put it, immigrant literature isn't its own separate, uniform genre.
  2. This isn't really so much of a discussion point as much as just a thought, but I would love to write a full story in another language, if only for the experience of it.  A few weeks ago I wrote for a homework assignment probably the first more-than-three sentence fictional story in Arabic I've ever done, and it was more fun than it probably should have been for the level of writing I was actually putting down.  Language can be fun, what can I say?
  3. The piece about the subculture of German-language immigrant-written books is a nice reminder of how English is far from the only language with unique modern literary movements going on.  It's frustratingly easy in America to forget about things like that.

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