This course examines how US literature has defined itself by rendering the so-called Orient as an object of representation. One sees the curious shape of this discourse in Washington Irving’s sketch of a miniature China in New Amsterdam, in Walt Whitman’s effort to model Persian lyric, in Edgar Allan Poe’s Qu’ran-inspired long poem, in Pearl S. Buck’s portrayals of Chinese village life, and in Gary Snyder’s Zen Buddhist poetics. US empire-making and waves of Asian immigration would alter and relocate the types of places and people imagined in these works--and, with the growth of Asian American writing, bring to light more nuanced understandings of non-Western cultures and subjectivities. Writers found preconceptions of “the East” both repressive and useful: works like Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and C.Y. Lee’s Flower Drum Song played with stereotypes and notions of exotic womanhood, while Hisaye Yamamoto’s fiction documented women’s isolation and struggle, emphatically rejecting the uses of Japanese femininity as a “decorative ingredient.” In the second half of the class, we will consider contemporary literary approaches to this discourse and its reemergence in “War on Terror” media. We’ll discuss novels that call attention to mimicry, performed authenticity, racial typecasting, and distinctions within the very idea of a coherent “Asian American” subject, such as Viet Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle, and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. We will conclude by examining the negative image of Muslim characters in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the critique of such images in Susan Youssef’s short film Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf.