The sociology of the avant-garde: Politics and form in language poetry and Asian American poetry.

详细信息   

• 作者：Yu ; Timothy.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2005
• 导师：Perloff, Marjorie
• 毕业院校：Stanford University
• 专业：Literature, American.;Literature, Modern.;Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies.
• ISBN：0496139355
• CBH：3153529
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：11947972
• Pages：303

文摘

Language poetry and Asian American poetry, two modes of contemporary American writing, can both be seen as avant-gardes, aesthetic formations that are simultaneously conscious of themselves as social formations. Their shared origins, and the reasons for their divergence, demonstrate how race, gender, and class inflect aesthetics.;Allen Ginsberg's poems of the late 1960s, dictated into a tape recorder while driving cross-country, seek to combine the media's generalizing power with individual consciousness, but reveal an uncertain, self-revising subjectivity. Language writer Ron Silliman extends Ginsberg's vision of a documentary poetry, but employs formal techniques that guard against Ginsberg's excesses of subjectivity. Silliman adapts to the political context of the 1970s by positing Language writing not simply as an aesthetic movement but as a social identity. Silliman's first major work, Ketjak, is both a convincing map of the social landscape and an uncomfortable exploration of white male consciousness.;Asian American poetry of the 1970s engaged in comparable struggles over identity and poetic form. The work of such poets as Janice Mirikitani, Francis Oka, and Lawson Fusao Inada reflects a dynamic fusion of Beat, jazz, and populist influences. But during the 1980s, as Language and Asian American writing gained mainstream visibility, their practices came to seem radically separate. The reception of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, neglected by Asian American critics until the 1990s, illustrates the avant-garde continuity of Language and Asian American writing, but also cautions against any simple attempt to integrate the two. The multiple and often conflicting structures that organize Dictee make it a text in which the impulses of experimental and Asian American writing meet in mutually critical fashion.;By the 1990s, the term "experimental Asian American poetry" had emerged to describe work like Cha's. But the writing of John Yau, far from providing such a synthesis, stages the history of and conflict between these contemporary avant-garde modes. In hanging on to the emptied-out structures of ethnic identity, Yau gains a foothold from which to critique Language poetry's attempt to incorporate the "marginal."