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1 _ Introduction The Aesthetic in Asian American Literary Discourse SUE-IM LEE A SIAN AMERICAN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP of the late twentieth century has struggled to negotiate a balance between the immanentist understanding of literature (as a symbolic embodiment that bears the historical and material forces of its production) and the countervailing attempt to argue that literature represents “something else’’—that a literary text is more than the sum of its identifiable (sociological, economic, political, historical) parts. The “aesthetic’’ has been an indispensable banner in projects seeking to articulate the “something else’’ of the literary, and this volume contributes to that effort by demonstrating the vitality and the volatility of the “aesthetic’’ as it circulates in Asian American literary discourse. By positioning issues of literary aesthetics and formal analysis at the heart of Asian American literary studies, this volume seeks to counterbalance the prevailing dominance of sociological and cultural materialist approaches in Asian American literary criticism, to bring about a self-consciousness in the multidisciplinary uses of literary texts, and ultimately, to argue the complementary possibility of a historically and materially engaged analysis that also recognizes the aesthetic as a rich critical variable. As with scholarship in many other minority literatures, the emergence and growth of Asian American literary criticism in the larger sphere of American literary studies has depended upon its ability to represent the material realities of its marginalized constituents. The parallel beginnings 2 \ I N T R O D U C T I O N of Asian American Studies in the academy and of Asian American political activism in the late-1960s have meant that, by and large, Asian American literary criticism has primarily sought to “speak’’ the material realities of hitherto “invisible,’’ “disenfranchised,’’ or “silent’’ subjects.1 Particularly in the last two decades, amidst the powerful influences of new historicism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, and the growing trend toward interdisciplinarity , Asian American literary criticism has become almost indistinguishable from the reading of “culture,’’ a term most expansively understood as the material and discursive structures of organized life. In this mode of criticism, literary works have been readily examined as symbolic enactments of material forces; as exemplifications of a particular ideology, phenomenon, or a conflict; or as illustrations of the political, economic, and sociological concerns of the times. The prevailing strength of late twentieth century Asian American literary discourse, then, lies in arguing the constructed nature of human organizations—the complex ways in which power operates in the formation of particularly racialized subjects called “Asian American.’’ Although Asian American literary criticism, like other minority literature scholarship, began with race as its pivotal lens of analysis, it has moved beyond the category of race to examine other social categorizations and institutions such as gender, class, sexuality, nation, capital, labor, and globalism. Perhaps one can discern the primacy of these sociological, economic, and political concerns most readily from the titles of monographs, anthologies, and edited essay collections in Asian American literary criticism of the last two decades. Concepts that recur as a title’s keyword, such as “cultural politics,’’ “nation,’’ “transnation ,’’ “orientalism,’’ “resistance,’’ or “subversion,’’ bespeak the discipline’s particularly focused energy upon such concepts.2 Certainly, materialist and political examinations of race, gender, sexuality, and nation need not preclude or exclude the possibility of treating texts as literary objects, but just such a balance, we contend, has not been successfully maintained in the Asian American literary criticism of the last two decades. That is, Asian American literary criticism at large has been slow to extend the analysis of the constructedness of human-made categories and institutions to include the examination of Asian American literary works as aesthetic objects—objects that are constituted by and through deliberate choices in form, genres, traditions , and conventions.3 The aesthetic, here, signifies the constructed dimension of the literary, the fact that literary objects are no less human-made—no less contrived—than ideological apparatus and social institutions. While the constructed nature of race, gender, nationality, sexuality, family, colonialism, among others, have I N T R O D U C T I O N / 3 been featured in the spotlight of Asian American literary discourse, other equally constructed practices, such as formal conventions, literary devices, genre particularities, and figurative language are more likely to be left in the wings of the critical stage. This de-emphasis of literary aesthetics is certainly not unique to the field of Asian American literary discourse. In a germinal expression against this lacuna, George Levine’s introductory essay “Reclaiming...

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