A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature

Acknowledgements

ac k now l e d g m e n t s I began work on this book while based at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. I thank Fulbright New Zealand and the Davis Center— in particular, Timothy Colton and Lisbeth Tarlow—for providing me with the opportunity to research and write in a stimulating interdisciplinary environment. I am especially grateful to Stephanie Sandler, who welcomed me into the intellectual life of the university. Her scholarship and her engagement with my work are ongoing sources of inspiration. I am also very grateful to the graduate students and other faculty in the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, English, and Comparative Literature, and especially to Svetlana Boym. Her invitation to contribute to a special issue of Poetics Today on estrangement led me to draft an initial chapter of this book and to begin to map its conceptual framework. I wrote the rest of this book while based at the University of Otago. I am grateful to my colleagues there, especially those in the Department of English, the Russian Studies Research Cluster, the Asia-New Zealand Research Cluster, and the Cross-Cultural and Comparative Studies research group, for providing a supportive and challenging scholarly milieu in which to test and develop my ideas. My departmental chair, Lyn Tribble, provided extraordinary institutional and intellectual support for which I am deeply grateful. Wendy Parkins also gave me incisive feedback on a draft of chapter 1. Many other colleagues have offered help, suggestions, and encouragement in ways too numerous to list here but for which I am no less grateful. Once at the University of Otago, I was the recipient of a Fast-Start Grant from the Marsden Fund, administered by the Royal Society of Acknowledgments xii New Zealand. This grant allowed me to carry out much of the research for and writing of this book. I am also grateful for the generous financial support of the University of Otago and for the assistance of various bodies within the university, including the Department of English, the Centre for Research on National Identity, and the AsiaNew Zealand and Russian Studies Research Clusters. Numerous people generously assisted me in researching this book. I would like especially to thank Maghiel van Crevel and Bonnie McDougall for their extensive help with locating primary sources and for their feedback on drafts. I am also grateful to Bonnie for permission to cite from her unpublished correspondence with me and from her letters and papers, including those held in the Bei Dao Archive at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I likewise thank Anders Hansson for permission to cite from one of his letters held in this archive, and Alexander Kan and Michael Molnar for permission to quote from their letters to Lyn Hejinian. I am also grateful to Leo Ma and the staff of the New Asia College Library and the Research Centre for Translation in the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; the staff and curators at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , especially Jane Sharp and Julia Tulovsky; the librarians at the University of Auckland special collections; the staff of the Memorial archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg; and the librarians at the University of California San Diego Mandeville Special Collections, especially Lynda Claassen and Robert Melton, and the Friends of the UCSD Libraries. Many others have offered feedback on drafts or oral presentations or pointers and encouragement for further research, or have in other ways assisted me in my work on this book, including Cosima Bruno, Rey Chow, Katerina Clark, David Damrosch, Michael Davidson, David Herd, Michel Hockx, Ilya Kutik, Brian Moloughney, Mary Nicholas, Stephen Owen, Benjamin Paloff, Evgeny Pavlov, Marjorie Perloff, Ellen Rutten, Lisa Samuels, Stephanie Sandler, Ann Vickery, Donald Wesling, Erika Wolf, and Michelle Yeh. Christopher Bush, Craig Dworkin, Edward Gunn, Eric Hayot, Michael Heim, Gerald Janecek, and Barrett Watten in particular offered incisive feedback on drafts of chapters of this book in ways that have proved crucial. My work on three of the authors discussed here—Yang Lian, Lyn Hejinian, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko—began with my PhD dissertation written at the University of Auckland under the guidance Acknowledgments xiii of Hilary Chung, Michael Hanne, Ian Lilly, and Michele Leggott, and with the generous financial...