Viet thanh nguyen's recent successes might appear to have come out of nowhere. before the sympathizer won the pulitzer prize and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was long-listed for the National Book Award, and before he was named a MacArthur Fellow, Nguyen was another hardworking academic, laboring away in a field that no one outside it knew much about. For those who labored alongside him in the same field, the story looks different. When many of us were finishing graduate school and looking for our first teaching jobs, there was a joke going around that all the applicants on the market that year were waiting to find out what Nguyen would do. He had gotten all the job offers in the field, and the other top contenders were hanging out on the waiting list. His irst book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), a study of how the idea of resistance circulates in critical discussions of Asian American literature, landed with a splash, becoming one of those works other scholars had to be familiar with. What made it stand out was his insistence that we not idealize resistance. If the standard story that scholars liked to tell was that Asian American literature adopted a radical posture when it came to race, seeking to critique racism and to conjure alternative social possibilities, Nguyen pointed out that the story was incomplete. Asian Americans, including creative writers, are as heterogeneous ideology-wise as they are heterogeneous in every other way.

How do we write, now? since i am writing for the pages of the publications of the modern language association of america, I presume the “we” here describes teachers of literature in the United States. I, outside in that “we,” think that most of us write, for a variety of reasons, with the presumed inclusion of “the global South” in our audience; although I also have the feeling that a lot of us, folks that I do not really know, ignore this requirement altogether. Geraldine Heng's important work has made us aware of this absence in the study of the literature of the Middle Ages. From the early modern era on, however, progressive writing does have this cultural requirement.

With the exception of occasional quiet moments on the raft, the circus scene in the adventures of huckleberry finn is arguably the only episode of the novel where Huck is absorbed by an experience that gives him pleasure:

In 2015 i received a letter from the mla informing me that since i had now been a member for forty years, i no longer had to pay dues. hat should have been welcome news, but I was horrified. Could I be that old? Had I actually given papers and chaired sessions at some thirty-five annual meetings since 1975, as my hastily consulted curriculum vitae proclaimed? hough rhetorical, the questions prompted a nostalgic encounter with a few nearly forgotten conference talks and a deeper contemplation of the person who delivered them. (How) had my reading and writing altered across the decades in which I moved from graduate student through the tenure ranks to professor emerita? What had it meant to age as a reader? Or, for the purposes of this short meditation, what had it meant to age as a reader of Jane Austen, whose presence threads through my teaching and writing from beginning to not-yet end?

Class size and teaching load, hierarchical relations between college and high school, mandates from federal and state government as well as school districts and principals, the socioeconomic status of communities in which schools are located, required external assessments, student and faculty retention rates, and literacy levels of English language learners all shape the way writing is taught in secondary school.

Although the united states lost the vietnam war on the battlefield, it won the war on two long-term fronts: economic ideology and cultural memory. A mere eleven years after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Vietnamese government officially transitioned from a ration economy to a market-socialist one. This perestroika resulted in capitalist development, more akin to what the United States had propagated when it entered the war to prevent the cascading growth of communism throughout Asia. The United States also triumphed in terms of memory, dominating narratives of the war through the global influence of its culture industries.

Reviews of viet thanh nguyen's the sympathizer (2015) regularly cite the vietnamese-french-american protagonist's self-characterization: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” (1). A less-cited version of the same characterization appears later in the novel: “I am a lie, a keeper, a book. No! I am a fly, a creeper, a gook. No! I am—I am—I am—” (325). Nguyen's unnamed narrator, a Northern Vietnamese spy with Southern sympathies, has exploited, betrayed, and even murdered his own. If the above statements are any indication, this Cold War history of slippery allegiances takes an existential toll. But the second statement adds a layer of intrigue. With rhyme, anaphora, and considerable theatrical aplomb, it transmutes ethnic duplicity into literary figuration and casts the narrator as another murderer with a fancy prose style. Murder and style, though, are not Nguyen's only connection to Vladimir Nabokov, whom Mark McGurl takes as iconic of the “codification and intensification of modernist reflexivity in the form of … ‘metafiction’” (9). Like Lolita and much of Nabokov's other fiction, The Sympathizer and many of Nguyen's writings hold up that special mirror of “modernist reflexivity.” For Nguyen, however, the chance to wield this mirror comes with the added responsibility of being a Vietnamese American author writing about Vietnamese America. Hence, if Nabokov's iction delivered “an elaborately performative ‘I am’” that enabled his “programmatic self-establishment” (10), Nguyen's equally performative “I am” instantiates not only an authorial program but also a political program of ethnic representation.

Discussions of reading as we age are usually tangled up in discussions of rereading, for good reason. recognizing change requires some point of orientation. Yes, there are things we can learn about the impact of aging when we read a new text (we may recognize, for example, that we don't read with the same speed and concentration that we once did). But, for the most part, the effects of the aging process emerge with greater clarity and with more nuance when we have an old reading (or a memory of an old reading) to hold up against our present perceptions. So imagine that you've read a work, on and off, over forty years (an act of imagination that will be easier for some readers than for others). What sorts of differences in your reactions are liable to emerge? here are lots of them, which run along several axes and often conflict.

I am a clinical psychologist who conducted a thriving private practice for over twenty-five years. At some point, however, I tired of focusing on deep-seated problems and longed to help people make tangible, external changes in their lives.

As someone who has spent most of his career writing about others, i find it odd to see myself, or what passes for me, being written about by others, especially academics, the people with whom I am most familiar. Who is this “Viet Thanh Nguyen” that they are discussing? Is he the one whose name appears as such on the cover of the Vietnamese translation of his short story collection, The Refugees, instead of as Nguyên Thanh Vie t, his Vietnamese name? Has “Viet Thanh Nguyen” disabled, in himself, the authenticity that most Vietnamese people hold dear and that he has been reminded of constantly throughout his life, symbolized in his name and his mother tongue? More important and urgent to him, is “Viet Thanh Nguyen,” in being discussed in such a manner, already dead?

Once, i needed the perfect time and place to write. i stood in my own way, affecting the dangers of worlds and audiences.

Everywhere I turn, there seems to be a new bandwagon waiting with bold claims on how it will save the humanities. I'm curious. I'm excited. I'm also weary.

The MOOC (massive open online course) explosion happened, and I participated with glee. It let no revolution in its wake. I love the deeply interdisciplinary and interactive shape of life for students at Design Tech High School in Silicon Valley but fear there's a dark side to Oracle's bankrolling it with upward of $43 million. And, in the bloating of middle management and infusion of cash into e.learning units on campuses across the country, we might be seeing “management theorists” lurking in sheep's clothes out to create a workforceready. only population. I worry for the twenty-two million students served in college—and especially all the rest not being served.