Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing

Contents

Contents 1. Introduction: The Aesthetic in Asian American Literary Discourse SUE-IM LEE / 1 Part I: Asian American Critical Discourse in Academia 2. Autonomy and Representation: Aesthetics and the Crisis of Asian American Cultural Politics in the Controversy over Blu’s Hanging MARK CHIANG / 17 3. Interventing Innocence: Race, ‘Resistance,’ and the Asian North American Avant-Garde / IYKO DAY / 35 Part II: Aesthetics and Ethnicity 4. The Asian American in a Turtleneck: Fusing the Aesthetic and the Didactic in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey MITA BANERJEE / 55 5. The Language of Ethnicity: John Yau’s Poetry and the Ethnic/Aesthetic Divide / CHRISTINA MAR / 70 vi \ C O N T E N T S 6. “A Flame against a Sleeping Lake of Petrol”: Form and the Sympathetic Witness in Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost / PATRICIA P. CHU / 86 7. Poignant Pleasures: Feminist Ethics as Aesthetics in Jhumpa Lahiri and Anita Rao Badami / GITA RAJAN / 104 Part III: Intertexts: Asian American Writing and Literary Movements 8. “A Loose Horse”: Asian American Poetry and the Aesthetics of the Ideogram / JOSEPHINE NOCK-HEE PARK / 123 9. “A New Rule for the Imagination”: Rewriting Modernism in Bone DONATELLA IZZO / 137 Part IV: Rewriting Form, Reading for New Expression 10. Performing Dialogic Subjectivities: The Aesthetic Project of Autobiographical Collaboration in Days and Nights in Calcutta ROCÍO G. DAVIS / 159 11. Bicultural World Creation: Laurence Yep, Cynthia Kadohata, and Asian American Fantasy / CELESTINE WOO / 173 12. Dismantling the Realist Character in Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea and David Henry Hwang’s FOB / KIMBERLY M. JEW / 187 Notes / 203 Notes on Contributors / 227 Index / 231 ...