Interventions Into Modernist Cultures: Poetry From Beyond the Empty Screen

202 Pages·2007·19.076 MB·English

by  Amie Elizabeth Parry

Interventions into Modernist Cultures
P e r v e r s e M o d e r n I t I e s
A series edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe

Amie Elizabeth Parry
∑
Interventions
into
Modernist
Cultures
∑
Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen
Duke university Press
durham & London 2007
© 2007 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Jennifer Hill
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
Hsia Yü: Amie Parry’s English translation of Hsia Yü’s poem
“Leaving on a Jet Plane” and of parts of her poem “Making Sentences”
are used by permission of the poet; Hsia Yü, “Ventriloquy”: English translation
by Steve Bradbury is reprinted by permission of the translator; Yü Kwang-chung,
“Hsilo Bridge”: English translation by the poet is reprinted by his permission.
Contents
∑
vii Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Canonical Modernisms, Minor Modernisms,
and the Cultural Politics of Fragmentation
one
21 The Historicity of the Fragment:
Toward a Critical Comparativism
two
44 “Completely Painted Over but Painted Full of Empty Spaces”:
Stein’s American Allegories and the End of Progress
three
80 “Learning a Lesson in the Superficial Song Lyrics”:
Hsia Yü’s “Underground” Poetry
Four
113 “For the Other Overlapping Time”: Pound’s Ideogramic
Universalism and Cha’s Countermodernist Translation
Conclusion
148 The Cultural Uses of an Interventionary Poetics
153 Notes
171 Works Cited
181 Index

Acknowledgments
∑
As i hoPe to suggest by its title, Interventions into Modernist Cul-
tures foregrounds texts that make historical and epistemological interven-
tions, and it groups together texts that are not usually seen as constituting
a coherent body of literature, whether the latter is nationally, aesthetically,
or thematically defined. In the long process of writing this book, I found
myself faced with a wide range of challenges coming from many different
directions. Dialogue with scholars in diverse fields has, therefore, been even
more essential to the overall writing process than it generally is. As I worked
on this project, many friends, colleagues, and former teachers offered helpful
responses, too many to acknowledge adequately here. However, because of
the challenges inherent in a project such as this, I would like to begin by
acknowledging my own responsibility for any remaining shortcomings of
this book.
I received exceptionally generous mentorship at the University of Califor-
nia, San Diego, that will always be invaluable to me intellectually, personally,
and politically; in this regard, I would like to express my enduring gratitude
to Wai-lim Yip and Michael Davidson. Page DuBois, Rosemary George, and
Christena Turner provided immeasurably helpful direction on early drafts.
Judith Halberstam introduced me to a more synthetic methodology for queer
critique that transformed my sense of what constitutes the politics of sexu-
ality. I continue to appreciate the unsettling difficulty of Masao Miyoshi’s
intellectual challenges; his responses have shaped many of the arguments in
these chapters. Lisa Lowe provided uniquely astute guidance and generous
encouragement that continued into this project’s later stages. I would like
to especially thank her for this and for compelling me to take up the on-
going task of unraveling the many subtleties of the larger social vision that
directs intellectual work. Mentorship happens among peers as well as with
professors, and in this regard I am deeply grateful to Helen Jun and Chan-
dan Reddy for profoundly illuminating discussions, for their willingness to
keep engaging with this project over a long course of its development, and
for a truly rare quality of friendship. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the
viii AcknowleDgments
many good friends who were important interlocutors as some of the ideas
developed here were first taking shape, including Kim Dillon, Kulvinder Au-
rora, Natalia Chan, Leo Ching, Grace Hong, Eleanor Jaluague, Berta Jottar,
Michael Lin, Tracey Walker, and Randy Williams.
The initial research that eventually led me to this comparative project was
funded by a Fulbright grant. I would like to thank Dr. Wu and the entire
staff at the Taipei Fulbright office for kindly direction and assistance that
well exceeded the call of duty and Ko Ching-ming for generously guiding
my early forays into the aesthetic and social complexities of Taiwan modern-
ism. Part of my early research was supported by the University of California
Humanities Research Institute. I would like to thank Theodore Huters for
organizing and leading the research group “Nationalism, Colonialism, and
Modernity in East Asia: The Cases of Korea, Japan, and China.” I am grate-
ful to the members of this in-residence group—Yoko Arisaka, Chungmoo
Choi, Tak Fujitani, James Fujii, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, Shu-mei Shih,
Miriam Silverberg, and Lisa Yoneyama—for their helpful comments on my
work and overall research direction. The National Science Council, Taiwan,
funded much of the subsequent research on theories of modernity and aes-
thetics as well as making it possible for me to present some of the material
from these chapters at international conferences. And, for providing a truly
congenial space for reading and intellectual discussion, I would like to thank
the owner and staff of Norwegian Wood.
My teaching and research environment in Taiwan has fostered intellec-
tual exchange of the highest quality. I would like to thank all my colleagues
at the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department of National Chiao
Tung University, especially Ying-hsiung Chou and Pin-chia Feng. The sec-
tions of chapter 4 on Ezra Pound were largely written during a research leave
at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies. I would
like to thank that institution for its support and Yuan Wen Chi, Wen-ching
Ho, Yu-Cheng Lee, and Te-Hsing Shan for feedback and friendly lunchtime
discussions. At the English Department at National Central University, I
thank David Barton and Dave Stuart for enlightening conversation about
the Western philosophical canon and public cultures of reading, respectively;
and I thank Steven Bradbury and Susanna Kuan for enlivening conversation
that made commuting pleasurable and educational. At Central and beyond,
I am grateful to all those involved with the interdisciplinary and interinsti-
AcknowleDgments ix
tutional Center for the Study of Sexualities and the Cultural Studies Cen-
ter. In addition to Josephine Ho and Kuan-hsing Chen, I can offer only an
abbreviated list of those members and affiliates to whom I am intellectually
indebted: Asha Achuthan, Antonia Chao, Spencer Lin, Fran Martin, Jiazhen
Ni, Karl Yin-Bin Ning, Cindy Patton, Wang Ping and all those involved with
g/s rAt, Rob Wilson, and Jonathan Yeh. I would like to offer special words
of gratitude to Naifei Ding and Jen-peng Liu; their brilliance has brightened
my work and my life, as it has for so many other scholars around the globe.
I also appreciate the intellectual community provided by Teri Silvio and her
media studies reading group. I feel uniquely grateful to Ru-Hong Lin for a
contribution to this manuscript that was simultaneously intellectual and of
another more rare quality that cannot be adequately described here. Conver-
sations with Lucifer Hung have left their baroque mark on my argument’s
queerer moments. I thank Chen Ting for her translation of part of chap-
ter 4, which made it possible for me to publish an article in Chinese, and
for her clarifying comments on the manuscript. I also thank Hsia Yü for her
insistence that my translations of her poetry capture, as much as is possible,
the subtlety of her language. Finally, for valuable research assistance and for
thoughtful questions that have influenced my thinking on these matters, I
thank the graduate students Jaren Lin, Emma Liu, David Tsai, and especially
Richard Hsu, who also helped edit the manuscript.
I acknowledge Perseus Books and Chiao Tung University Press for per-
mission to reprint early versions of sections from chapter 2 and chapter 4.
I am deeply grateful to my editors at Duke University Press. Ken Wissoker
recognized the potential of this project at its earliest stage and saw it through
to maturity; his foresight and his suggestions have been invaluable. At the
later stages, Anitra Grisales and Pam Morrison provided helpful and patient
direction, while Joseph Brown’s meticulous copyediting greatly improved the
quality of the manuscript. I would also like to thank the two anonymous
reviewers, whose engaged and detailed commentaries helped tremendously
in fleshing out the ramifications of argument.
I would like to conclude by acknowledging those who influenced and
encouraged me at personally formative stages. First, I thank Mr. Taylor for
being the first to bravely suggest an unlikely course of intellectual develop-
ment for me and William Cheek for permanently transforming my under-
standing of U.S. history and culture. I am grateful to Maureen Wang for her