Synopses & Reviews
American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter offers a framework for understanding the variety of encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. While the tradition of Asian-American literature and criticism is well-established, there has been less exposure to how China-based critics have viewed the increasing popularity of canonical and emerging American poetry. Contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979 and suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their subject with a degree of commitment that presaged China's subsequent dominance
Review
Review
'China talks back!:
American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter takes on American/Eurocentric transnationalism and explores the ways China has been ventriloquized, not to say Orientalized . . . by such key American poets as Williams, Pound, Auden, Hughes, Ginsberg, and alternative poetics in the Angel Island poems. This anthology marks a turning point for Chinese/American comparative poetics.' - Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania
'Finally we have a statement by Chinese-based scholars about their culture's relationship to twentieth-century American poetry. The book is intricately structured to cover three periods of interaction - the high-modern construction of 'Chineseness,' the West's interest in China's revolutionary ferment, and the period where Chinese hegemony enjoins dialogue and mutual learning. Most striking is these scholars' commitment to a historicism capable of resisting Western categories and yet reconfiguring our mutual imaginings of the future we are creating together.' - Charles Altieri, Rachael Anderson Stageberg Professor of English, University of California
Synopsis
American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounteroffers a framework for understanding the variety of imagined encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. The method is historical and materialist, insofar as the contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979. Even where specific poems are found to be erroneous, the contributors to the volume suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their 'Chinese' subject with a degree of commitment that presaged imaginatively China's subsequent dominance. The poems stand as unique artifacts, via proxy and in the English language, for the rise of China in the American imagination. The audience of the volume is international, including the growing number of scholars and graduate students in Chinese universities working on American literature and comparative cultural studies, as well as already established commentators and students in the west.
Synopsis
This edition documents the growth of interest in modernist and contemporary American poetry by scholars both inside and outside China. While the tradition of Asian-American literature and criticism is well-established, there has been less exposure to how China-based critics have viewed the increasing popularity of canonical and emerging American poetry. The volume uses a variety of approaches to argue a central theme—that the 'encounter' of American poetry with contemporary Chinese modernity is occasioning a radical refashioning of not only American perspectives on Chinese culture and values but of the impact of Western values upon the Chinese worldview.
Synopsis
American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter offers a framework for understanding the variety of encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. While the tradition of Asian-American literature and criticism is well-established, there has been less exposure to how China-based critics have viewed the increasing popularity of canonical and emerging American poetry. Contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979 and suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their subject with a degree of commitment that presaged China's subsequent dominance
About the Author
Zhang Yuejun is professor of English at Central South University (Changsha, Hunan). His research experience includes a Fulbright research fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (2011-2012) and an appointment at the University of California at Berkeley as a Visiting Scholar (2002-2003). Besides a monograph
In the American Grain: The Pragmatist Poetics of William Carlos Williams (in Chinese) (2006), he has published numerous essays on Anglo-American literature and literary criticism in China and Taiwan.
Stuart Christie is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of two books, Worlding Forster: The Passage from Pastoral (Routledge, 2005) and Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature (2009). His articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Foreign Literature Studies (?????? ), Western American Literature, Literature Compass, Media Studies, and The American Indian Quarterly among others.
Table of Contents
Introduction.Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie EntryChapter One. 'Between Walls': So Much Depends on Chinese Immigrant Poetry by Christopher A. ShinnChapter Two. H. T. Tsiang's Poems of the Chinese Revolution and Transpacific Bridges to a Radical Pastby James I. McDougallInfluenceChapter ThreeUsurious Translation: From Chinese Character to Western Ideology in Pound's Confucian 'Terminologies'by Stuart ChristieChapter Four. Wandering Lost Upon the Mountains of Our Choice: W. H. Auden's 'In Time of War' by Lim Lee ChingChapter Five.China and the Political Imagination in Langston Hughes's Poetry by Luo LianggongExitChapter Six.Allen Ginsberg's 'China' by Su Hui Chapter Seven.Caorlyn Kizer and Chinese Gui-yuan Poetry by Li JingChapter Eight.Jane Hirshfield's Poetic Voice and Zen Meditation by Chung LingContributor Biographies