Lingyan Yang, associate professor in the English Department, presented a research paper, "Asian American Magical Realism in the Americas in Karen Tei Yamashita'sThrough the Arc of the Rain Forest," at the MLA (Modern Language Association) annual convention January 9-12, 2020, in Seattle.
Yang also chaired the panel in which she presented. The acceptance rate for this paper in this MLA panel was 9 percent.
The paper focuses on Asian American magical realism, which Yang coins as a newer artistic concept and a hybridized literary form between magical realism and Asian American cultural criticism exemplified by the novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest(1990) by Karen Tei Yamashita, a prominent contemporary Asian American woman writer of Japanese heritage. The novel is settransnationally in the hemispheric Amazon forest in Latin America.
MLA is the most prestigious and largest professional organization in all sub-fields of English, languages, and literature. Each year, about 7,000 to 8,000 scholars and graduate students from the nation and the world gather to share their latest research.