She is the author of the novel When the Emperor Was Divine, and a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship.
Author: Julie Otsuka
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9780241145722
Category: Fiction
Page: 160
View: 911
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction It is four months after Pearl Harbour and overnight signs appear all over the United States instructing Japanese Americans to report to internment camps for the duration of the war. For one family it proves to be a nightmare of oppression and alienation. Explored from varying points of view - the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train journey; the son in the desert encampment; the family's return home; and the bitter release of their father after four years in captivity - it tells of an incarceration that will alter their lives for ever. Based on a true story, Julie Otsuka's powerful, deeply humane novel tells of an unjustly forgotten episode in America's wartime history.
Author: Gale, Cengage LearningPublish On: 2016-07-12
This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more.
Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale Cengage Learning
ISBN: 9781410344410
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 19
View: 609
A Study Guide for Julie Otsuka's "When the Emperor Was Divine," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
ABOUT THE BOOK At its core, Julie Otsukas novel When the Emperor Was Divine is a story about characters, and she portrays them beautifully.
Author: Judith Mary Wilson
Publisher: Hyperink Inc
ISBN: 9781614640691
Category: Study Aids
Page: 37
View: 435
ABOUT THE BOOK At its core, Julie Otsukas novel When the Emperor Was Divine is a story about characters, and she portrays them beautifully. With simplicity, distance, and precise attention to the details of the era, she draws on universal human emotions to create individuals whose experiences, thoughts, and perceptions open a window to the history of a troubling time in Americas history. The story begins in 1942, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, and it follows four members of one Japanese-American family as they leave their home in Berkeley, CA, and endure more than three years as internees in War Relocation Camps. Otsuka captures the guilt and shame, confusion and resignation that they feel, as they suffer indignities and loss resulting from the fears and prejudice of others, which theyve done nothing to deserve. MEET THE AUTHOR Judith M. Wilson is a writer, editor, and award-winning journalist. She and her husband live in Northern California with their family. Her interests include travel, learning languages, good food, and long walks. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Its spring, 1942 and a sunny day in Berkeley, CA, as an unnamed woman sets out to return a book to the library. The day starts out pleasant enough, but then suddenly, everything changes. Overnight, signs have appeared everywherein store windows, at the entrance to buildings, and stapled at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue. The woman looks at one in the window of the post office and goes home. She never reaches the library. The woman is Japanese, and the United States is at war with Japan. The government believes that people of Japanese ethnicity who live in the coastal states of the western United States are a threat and is rounding them up and placing them in isolated internment camps inland. The authorities had taken her husband into custody the day after the attack on Peal Harbor, and he had already been sent to a camp out of state. Now she has learned that the rest of the family is about to be relocated. She spends the following days packing, deciding what to keep and what to throw out, and attending to the details, as she gets her family ready to leave their home for an unknown destination and an undetermined period of time. CHAPTER OUTLINE Quicklet on Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine + About When the Emperor Was Divine + About Julie Otsuka + Overall Summary + Chapter-by-Chapter Commentary + ...and much more
This 40-page guide for "When the Emperor Was Divine" by Julie Otsuka includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis covering 5 chapters, as well as several more in-depth sections of expert-written literary analysis.
Author: Supersummary
Publisher:
ISBN: 1690884606
Category:
Page: 42
View: 531
SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality study guides for challenging works of literature. This 40-page guide for "When the Emperor Was Divine" by Julie Otsuka includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis covering 5 chapters, as well as several more in-depth sections of expert-written literary analysis. Featured content includes commentary on major characters, 25 important quotes, essay topics, and key themes like Loss of Identity and The Displacement and Alienation of Immigrants.
Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2.0, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: Julie Otsuka novels "When the Emperor was Divine ...
Author: Marnie Hensler
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783346432650
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 26
View: 747
Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2.0, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: Julie Otsuka novels "When the Emperor was Divine"(2002) and "The Buddha in the Attic" (2011) narrate the collective trauma experienced by Japanese immigrants in America during the Second World War. With the help of different narrative techniques, both novels communicate the collective trauma to the contemporary reader. This paper analyses the different narrative strategies and their effects on the Western reader in greater detail through traditional close reading strategies. While "When the Emperor was Divine" narrates the collective trauma through alternating, individual perspectives of a representative Japanese family, "The Buddha in the Attic" manages to create a more powerful communal voice with its consistent first-person plural narration.
40. Yoshito Wayne Osaki, in Brian Komei Dempster, ed., Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese Exile and Resettlement (Berkeley: Heyday, 2010) p. 103. Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine (New York: Anchor, 2003), p. 143.
Author: Nancy L. Rosenblum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9781400881314
Category: Philosophy
Page: 312
View: 697
How our everyday interactions as neighbors shape—and sometimes undermine—democracy "Love thy neighbor" is an impossible exhortation. Good neighbors greet us on the street and do small favors, but neighbors also startle us with sounds at night and unleash their demons on us, they monitor and reproach us, and betray us to authorities. The moral principles prescribed for friendship, civil society, and democratic public life apply imperfectly to life around home, where we interact day to day without the formal institutions, rules of conduct, and means of enforcement that guide us in other settings. In Good Neighbors, Nancy Rosenblum explores how encounters among neighbors create a democracy of everyday life, which has been with us since the beginning of American history and is expressed in settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry, and popular culture. During disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, the democracy of everyday life is a resource for neighbors who improvise rescue and care. Degraded, this framework can give way to betrayal by neighbors, as faced by the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, or to terrible violence such as the lynching of African Americans. Under extreme conditions the barest act of neighborliness is a bulwark against total ethical breakdown. The elements of the democracy of everyday life—reciprocity, speaking out, and "live and let live"—comprise a democratic ideal not reducible to public principles of justice or civic virtue, but it is no less important. The democracy of everyday life, Rosenblum argues, is the deep substrate of democracy in America and can be its saving remnant.
Once When the Emperor Was Divine was published it received immediate popular reception and critical acclaim, and was chosen as recommended reading in many high schools and colleges. The New York Times reviewer Samuel G. Freeman noted ...
Author: Jade Tsui-yu Lee
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9789811563638
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 141
View: 863
Departing from Jacques Derrida’s appropriations of cinders as a trope of war atrocity aftermath, this book examines writings that deal with war trauma memories in Asian-American communities. Seeing war experiences and their associative diasporas and affects as the core and axis, it considers the multifarious poetics and politics of minority trauma writings, and posits a possible interpretive framework for contemporary Asian-American writings, including those written by Julie Otsuka, Joseph Craig Danner, Monique Truong, Nguyen Viet Thanh, Janice Lowe Shinebourne, and Andre Lamontagne. As these writings contain works regarding Japanese-American, Indo-Chinese Guyanese, Chinese Quebeçois, Vietnamese exiles/refugees, and Vietnam-American experiences, this book presents a broad cross-cultural view on migration and minority issues triggered by wars and precarious conditions, as the diversified experiences examined here epitomize an intricate historical intimacy across four continents: Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe.