Best of the EAA Archives: Using Literature in the Classroom Edition

The “Best of EAA Articles” are a series of posts that include outstanding articles, essays, interviews, and reviews that are among the over 1,500 archived open access materials available on the Education About Asia website. Titles, short annotations, and links are below.

Throughout the years, a number of superb literature articles, essays, and interviews have been published in EAA. This is the first installment of several we plan to post in the coming weeks.

• “History As Literature, Literature As History, Lost Names: Scenes From a Korean Boyhood — An EAA Interview with Richard Kim” (fall 1999): Richard Kim describes his novel about a young boy in Japanese-occupied Korea: “…all the characters and events in the book are real but everything else is fiction.” Middle school, high school, and undergraduate instructors have all assigned this superb work.

• “Her: An Indonesian Short Story” by Titis Basino, translated by Florence Lamoureux (spring 2001): The only short story published thus far in EAA depicts the interplay between divorce and Islam in one Indonesian family.

• “Using Novels to Teach the Cultural Geographies of South Asia” by Jean Lavigne (spring 2011): A geographer’s creative essay on how she uses novels to help students better understand South Asia.

• “Bringing Students Into The World: Asia in the World Literature Classroom” (spring 2013): Melek Ortabasi does a nice job in this essay of providing engaging sketches of both classical and modern examples of Asian literature she has used in her own classes.

• “Natsume Sōseki and Modern Japanese Literature” (fall 2015): Marvin Marcus introduces readers to the life and major works of Japan’s most famous Meiji-era novelist.

Best of EAA Articles, Number 6. Read the previous posts in this series.

To subscribe to Education About Asia or sign up for the free EAA Digest e-newsletter, please visit the EAA website. EAA is currently soliciting manuscripts for its spring 2018 issue, which will include a special thematic section on “Asian Politics.”