People On Sunday 2010

Prof. Becky Smith: Excerpt from Carolyn Kellog’s review of “Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing”, Los Angeles Times, July 5th, 2010

“…the dilemma of assimilation is never completely resolved. Each partial resolution is an invention, the result of a fresh confrontation with an environment whose coordinates and ground rules are always subtly shifting. In immigrant literature there is never simple acceptance but rather a constant questioning, a weighing of contradictory and compelling appeals, a never-ending examination of what really comprises a national identity.”