Part 1: Essay assignment: Overview of American Immigrant Literature with emphasis on USA’s dominant culture plus relations & differences with later immigrants / "Model Minorities," true minorities, New World Immigrants.

Length: 1 – 1.5 hours. 6-8 paragraphs? (depending on style, length, etc.)

Special requirements / options:

• Required: Give your essay a title.

• Required: Somewhere in essay, refer to one or more previous final exam essays from Model Assignments. (Esp. useful for dominant culture.)

• Required: references to Overall Course Objective 1 or other objectives detailing different ethnic communities.

• Optional: personal references—not required, but you may refer to your own backgrounds, previous knowledge, & interpretations of materials. Relate all such references to the assignment or objectives.

• Optional: You may quote or otherwise cite passages from your or your classmates' midterms to describe earlier ethnic immigrant / minority narratives or identities (e..g., immigrant, minority, "model minority," New World immigrant). (Model Assignments)

Question: Write a complete, unified essay with a compelling central thesis answering: how has American multicultural identity been written, defined, and varied through the Immigrant Narrative? Start with the early English immigrant-settlers and their establishment of the USA's dominant culture, describing that culture's styles, symbols, and values; refer to "founding documents" and informational websites.

Next, discuss how other immigrant or minority groups* compare with or differ from the dominant culture. How did early English immigrants' origins and immigration histories define and develop the USA's dominant culture, and how have the origins, histories, identities, or narratives of other immigrant or minority groups related to this dominant culture or been shaped by it? How have immigration and the minority experience defined the American multicultural landscape? 

(*other immigrant or minority groups = standard immigrants / "Model Minority" immigrants; true minorities; New World immigrants)

Other prompts or considerations: (You aren't expected to answer all these bullets—just possible starting points or considerations.)

• Review Overall Objective 1 (see bottom of exam) and describe how various immigrant or minority groups embody or describe its different aspects or identities for American culture.

•  If the Dominant culture serves as a defining background for American culture, what kind of culture do immigrants assimilate to? What is the Dominant Culture's attitude toward assimilation?

• Are American systems and values universal, or are they limited by race or ethnic descent? Do earlier immigrant cultures trust later immigrants with their institutions?

• Dominant culture: plain style, impersonality, English language, literacy, Protestantism, self-government, individualism / nuclear family, freemarket capitalism, modernity over tradition, assimilation issues.

• Why is the USA's dominant culture hard to isolate, identify, and study as part of America's multicultural landscape? What features or qualities of the dominant culture make it resistant or unattractive to analysis? What advantages may knowledge of this subject bring? Can rewards of studying dominant culture overcome students' instinctive rejection of its subject?

• What images or identities of the dominant culture did you previously have in mind, and how has our course developed or challenged those impressions? What identifying markers, institutions, or styles? (Refer to examples in texts and popular culture.) Don't forget the recurrent "soap" metaphor!

Potential prompts for relating other immigrant / minority groups to Dominant Culture:

• How does or doesn't the group assimilate  or acculturate to (or resist) the dominant culture?

• How do different groups' origins and histories of immigration help define their relations to the USA's dominant culture and to other immigrant / minority groups?

Do not regard these promps as a checklist—not enough time! Working with our course's terms and objectives, develop your own approach to our course's use of immigration to describe our multicultural society angle so that you can connect essential texts, objectives, and ideas from across the course. Welcome to identify your personal and professional backgrounds and attitudes relative to this issue.

Required references to objectives, terms, etc.: Esp. objectives 1 & 4 for overview & Dominant Culture and language from discussions, webpage, lecture

Evaluation standards: Readability and interest; knowledge and comprehension of texts and objectives; development of thematic organization in essay.

Required textual references: For discussion of Dominant Culture, refer to Of Plymouth Plantation at least twice*, one Scotch-Irish source, one text from the USA's founding generation (Crevecoeur, Declaration, or Constitution). For each of the other immigrant / minority groups—standard immigrant / "Model Minority," minority, New World immigrant—refer to at least one text from anywhere this semester.  (*For the Puritan / Pilgrim founders, you may refer to Of Plymouth Plantation once and Model of Christian Charity once.)

For text choices, you're expected to refer mostly to our shared reading assignments, but you may also use one or two poems from poetry presentations for your text selections.

Possible text / website choices:

Dominant Culture: USA's dominant culture; Ethnicities of Dominant Culture, "Pilgrim Fathers" & "Founding Fathers"; Protestant Work Ethic; Protestantism; The Triumphant Decline of the WASP, WASP, Notes from Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in North America (1989);

• Pilgrims / Puritans (two text references): Of Plymouth Plantation, Model of Christian Charity;

• Virginia Cavaliers / Founding Fathers (one text reference): Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, Crevecoeur, "What is an American?" & "Description of Charles-Town: Thoughts on Slavery . . . " (1782);

• Scotch-Irish (one website reference): Scotch-Irish; Scotch-Irish Immigration

Standard Immigrant Narrative / "Model Minority" immigrant narrative (one reference): See texts & links for 9 September, 23 September, 2 December or listings provided on Midterm1.

Minority Narrative (one reference): See texts & links for 16 September, 30 September or listings provided on Midterm1.

New World Immigrant Narrative (one reference): See texts & links for 14, 21, & 28 October or listings provided on Midterm2.

Poems (since second midterm): Hamod (Sam), “After the Funeral of Assam Hamady”; Enid Dame, “On the Road to Damascus, Maryland"; Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “Restroom"; for other poems scan syllabus or see listings at Midterm1 & Midterm2.

Evaluation criteria for essays: Readability & surface competence, content quality, and unity / organization.

• Readability & surface competence: Your reader must be able to process what you're reporting. Given the pressures of a timed writing exercise, some rough edges are acceptable, but chronic errors or elementary style can hurt.

• Content quality: Comprehension of subject, demonstration of learning, + interest & significance: Make your reader *want* to process your report. Make the information meaningful; make it matter to our study of literature and culture. Reproduce course materials, especially through reference to terms and objectives, but also refresh with your own insights and experiences. Avoid: "You could have written this without taking the course."

• Thematic Unity and Organization: Unify materials along a line of thought that a reader can follow from start to finish. (Consider "path of learning": what you started with, what you encountered, where you arrived.)

Part 2: Research Report with bibliography or works cited (1.5+ hours)

Format requirements

Title: Give your report a title

Length: approximately 8-10 paragraphs (depending on style, length, etc.)

Time: 1-1.5 hours (or more)

Assignment description: Write a complete report describing your research and learning concerning your chosen subject.

• Student is responsible for having researched at least four sources on the subject before the exam.

• Organize the information you found and review how you may use it, either in your college career, teaching, or personal development.

• The emphasis is on information, not opinion and analysis, though some summary and evaluation is welcome and expected. It's a report foremost.

• You are encouraged to connect your findings to course objectives or texts.

Default organization: You're writing on the spot and finals are read quickly. The path of least resistance is to describe and unify your report as a "quest" or "journey of learning."

Works Cited / Bibliography: Include a list of your major research sources (at least four).

• MLA style is preferred, but other standard forms are acceptable. Don't spend too much time fussing over forms when you should be feeling impassioned over your subject.

• My test for a bibliographic listing: Would I be able to find your source using the information you provided?

• You may use previous research reports for 1 or 2 of your sources

Evaluation standards: Readability, competence levels, and interest.

• Readability & surface competence: Your reader must be able to process what you're reporting. Given the pressures of a timed writing exercise, some rough edges are acceptable, but chronic errors or elementary style can hurt.

• Content quality: quality of research, comprehension of subject, demonstration of learning, + interest & significance: Make your reader *want* to process your report. Make the information meaningful; make it matter to our study of literature and culture.

• Thematic Organization: Unify materials along a line of thought that a reader can follow from start to finish. (Consider "path of learning": what you started with, what you encountered, where you arrived.)

Purposes of final exam:

• Research report: students develop individual interests in course materials, demonstrate research skills, and explain findings.

• Essay 1 starting with dominant culture: students explain and criticize an elusive but significant subject by referring to objectives and by comparing texts, narratives, identities, and images.

Overall Objective 1: To identify the immigrant narrative as a defining story, model, or social contract for American culture and recognize its relations to "the American Dream” and other multicultural narratives or identities. Such applications identify four multicultural groups or narratives for the United States of America.

• The standard immigrant story of escaping the Old World and assimilating to the New World and its dominant culture; two great historical waves of American immigration:

  • late 1800s to early 1900s: southern, eastern, and central Europeans including Jews

  • late 20th-early 21st century: Asian Americans + New World Immigrants in late 20th-early 21st century

  • (Jews and Asian Americans sometimes called "model minorities" for assimilation to American economics, esp. education, professions, and capitalism; also "STEM.")

• Minority narratives (African Americans, Native Americans) are NOT immigrant stories (i.e., voluntary participation and assimilation) but stories of involuntary contact and exploitation, resisting assimilation (or being denied opportunities) and creating an identity more or less separate from the mainstream. (Color code as wild-card factor.)

• The New World immigrant (Hispanic/Latino/a and Afro-Caribbean) constitutes the largest wave of contemporary immigration and combines immigrant and minority narratives: voluntary immigration from the Caribbean / West Indies or MesoAmerica but also often experience of exploitation by USA in countries or origin, or through identification with minorities (Indians and Blacks) via color code.

• The Dominant Culture of earlier immigrants from Northern and Western Europe—despite their predominance and power, this group is often hardest to identify because of their "unmarked" status: often identified with whiteness but also middle-class modesty, plainness, and cleanliness. Analogous to the Exodus story, the dominant culture does not assimilate to pre-existing cultures but displaces earlier traditions. Two major strains: middle-class Puritans (Pilgrims) emphasizing education, community, and progress, and Scots-Irish, hillbilly, or redneck culture emphasizing common-sense traditions, family honor, warrior culture, evangelical religion, and resentment of elites.

These categories are far from exclusive, absolute, or definitive, but only proximate efforts to represent informal classifications that are practiced by our society and evidenced in our literature. Borders or boundaries of human identities are always more or less fluid and blendable, and social contracts are constantly renegotiated.

(People and their stories are always complicated, always changeable, and always frustrating to efforts at classification, but the need to classify—mostly as "us and them" or "self and other"—is also distinctively human.)

(For additional objectives, scroll to bottom of course homepage.)