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Literary Magazines and Your Ideas – Poll

Hi Beautiful Readers! As writers, literary hangers-on, and readers, we all know that the esteemed literary magazine is the pillar, the bulwark, of the literary scene. We know that there are more literary magazines than there are readers, but not as many as there are writers. We know that literary magazines have problems and solutions in this day and age of digital accessibility.

I want to run a quick poll about your ideas of the current Lit Mag landscape. I have my own opinions, and I will be posting on that when this poll is over in a week.

Thanks for participating!

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A Response to Who Killed Vincent Chin? and The Cheat

Before you start reading, this post seems to be perpetually popular in my traffic statistics. The question this brings up for me is whether this is one of the few commentaries on these specific texts / films, or if there is another reason. I would appreciate insight, if you care to leave a comment. If not, you should probably read my statement on plagiarism. Thanks! On to the reason you’re here:

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Both Who Killed Vincent Chin?and The Cheat should cause a modern audience to cringe. Because these cringes may be for two different reasons, the visceral reactions to these films deserve some investigation and explication. In the earlier movie, The Cheat, the orientalist approach to the representation of the villain and the exploitation of popular prejudices against Asian people serve to drive the narrative. Looking back on this film from 1915 offers a chance to examine the unquestioned prejudices and expectations of Asian people during early 20th century America. Who Killed Vincent Chin?, on the other hand, is a much more recent production and offers an examination of both the similarities and differences to those prejudices and expectations in late 20th century America. That the changes displayed between the two films mostly offer only superficial effect offers commentary about the distance still remaining to be traveled in treating prejudice and racism in America today.

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Response to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

Before you start reading, this post seems to be perpetually popular in my traffic statistics. The question this brings up for me is whether this is one of the few commentaries on these specific texts / films, or if there is another reason. I would appreciate insight, if you care to leave a comment. If not, you should probably read my statement on plagiarism. Thanks! On to the reason you’re here:

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Any person living in the space between two cultures faces risks and rewards for abandoning his or her native culture for the culture of the adopted state. Additionally, that individual faces other risks in the attempt to straddle that liminal space. These risks become clarified in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, in which she writes from the perspective of a second-generation immigrant, clearly straddling the cultural divide between China and the United States. One of the primary issues Kingston interrogates is the risk of assimilation, most clearly questioned when she writes, “How can Chinese keep any traditions at all…slipping in a ceremony and clearing the table before the children notice specialness[?]” (185). This interrogation points out the danger of losing custom and culture through the assimilation process.

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