essays on Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street(Julián Olivares),
and Hisaye Yamamoto Seventeen Syllables (King-Kok Cheung) and learn a
great deal about the development of the short story form since World War
II. A course in the twentieth-century American novel that used the essays
here by John Purdy on Louise Erdrich Love Medicine, William Thackeray
on James Welch Winter in the Blood, Daniel Ross on Alice Walker The
Color Purple, and Susan Meisenhelder on Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes
Were Watching God would be a course helping to reassess the form and
function of the American novel.

In survey classes, ethnic American literature helps us to redefine the very
notion of "American." As these essays show, the borders are being pushed
north and south: Mitsuye Yamada's chapter on Joy Kogawa reminds us that
the experiences of Japanese Americans were the same on both sides of the
borders of North America--interned in both Canada and the United States.
The chapters on Native American and Mexican American literatures (the
essays on Leslie Marmon Silko and Rudolfo Anaya, for example) remind us
that our southern borders have always been fluid and historically arbitrary
and continue to separate people who are ethnically related: both Native
American and Mexican American populations trace their roots to two sides
of the border simultaneously.

In both cases, ethnic American writers are helping us to rethink and
reposition our literature--its borders, its subjects, its forms. Perhaps that is
because, as Frank Shuffleton has written, ethnicity is a process--a dynamic
relationship of assimilation and alienation--and not a product. ¹ And this
may be the reason why traditional academic literary criticism has not worked
as well with ethnic writers. Older criticism functions best with literary works
that are finished, completed. Ethnic American literature is itself a process--
in its stories of assimilation and resistance, of immigration and oppres--
sion--and demands a criticism that is equally flexible and fluid. The essays
below are part of the development of that new criticism.

The responses of our students to this literature demonstrate just how
alive the issues of this literature are for all of us today. As Julián Olivares
writes so eloquently in his essay on Sandra Cisneros, below, the subjects of
the essays in this collection are not works of anthropology and sociology
but, rather, works of art dealing with issues central to our definitions of
ourselves as Americans. Their themes--of marginality, identity, alienation--
are still the issues of Americans struggling to understand and come to grips
with American life at the end of the twentieth century. And no one under-
stands these themes better than American college students.

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