ebook img

American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter PDF

197 Pages·2012·1.535 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter

American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter Edited by Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY AND THE CHINESE ENCOUNTER Copyright © Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-39171-0 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35172-5 ISBN 978-0-230-39172-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230391727 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American modernist poetry and the Chinese encounter / Edited by Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie. pages cm ISBN 978–0–230–39171–0 (hardback) 1. American poetry—Appreciation—China. 2. National characteristics, American, in literature. 3. Modernism (Literature)—China. I. Zhang, Yuejun, 1965– II. Christie, Stuart, 1967– PS159.C5A44 2012 811.009—dc23 2012014916 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Figures and Tables vii Acknowledgments i x Introduction 1 Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie Part I Entry 1 “Between Walls”: So Much Depends on Chinese Immigrant Poetry in Defining the Modernist Age 19 Christopher A. Shinn 2 H. T. Tsiang’s Poems of the Chinese Revolution and Transpacific Bridges to a Radical Past 49 James I. McDougall Part II Influence 3 Usurious Translation: From Chinese Character to Western Ideology in Pound’s Confucian “Terminology” 77 Stuart Christie 4 Wandering Lost upon the Mountains of Our Choice: W. H. Auden’s “In Time of War” 95 Lim Lee Ching 5 China and the Political Imagination in Langston Hughes’s Poetry 111 Luo Lianggong vi ● Contents Part III E xit 6 Allen Ginsberg’s “China” 123 Su Hui 7 Grievance of the Gendered Self: Chinese G uiyuan Elements in Carolyn Kizer’s Poems 133 Li Jing 8 Jane Hirshfield’s Poetic Voice and Zen Meditation 153 Chung Ling Note on Contributors 179 Index 183 Index of Chinese Sources and Uses 195 Figures and Tables Figures 3.1 Dào (the way) . Ezra Pound, trans., Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects (New York: New Directions, 1951) 82 3.2 Jìng (respect). Ezra Pound, trans., Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects (New York: New Directions, 1951) 83 3.3 Dé (virtue). Ezra Pound, trans., Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects (New York: New Directions, 1951) 84 3.4 Yì (equity). Ezra Pound, trans., Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects (New York: New Directions, 1951) 86 Table 3.1 Six modes of character construction 80 Table modified from source: Zuo Ming’an (左民安). Xi Shuo Han Zi (細說漢字, “Origin of Chinese Characters”). Beijing: Jiu Zhou Chu Ban She, 2005. Acknowledgments T he editors would like to thank specific individuals whose support and knowledge made the intercultural as well as translational challenges of this edition seem less daunting: Charles Bernstein, A. V. Christie, Glennys Christie, 何聰慧, Deepa John, 林韻莊, David Lam, Brent Newsome, Nie Zhenzhao, Ou Hong, Sy Suet Yee, 徐荻緯, and Scott Smiley . The China Scholarship Council, the Fulbright Foundation, as well as the Hong Kong Research Grants Council funded specific elements of this research, for which support both editors are extremely grateful. The edito- rial staff and production team at Palgrave Macmillan and Newgen have exercised good humor, forbearance, and restraint at all stages of the process. E arlier versions of Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight, exten- sively revised for these pages, appeared respectively in T he Journal of Cambridge Studies 5.1 (2010) and Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 21.1 (2011–2012), © Waxman Verlag. Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China Introduction Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie I n July 2007, scholars descended upon Wuhan, Hubei province, for an international conference dedicated to scholarship on American modernist and contemporary poets. 1 Significantly, the great majority of attendees were Chinese scholars and students eager to bring their English-language research on American and American-based poets and poetry (ranging from Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, from W. H. Auden to Allen Ginsberg) into dialogue with their international peers. The initial aim and audi- ence of the present volume correspond to those of the 2007 con- ference: not only to document the best of such research—on how American modernist poetry has been received and analyzed by Chinese commentators—but also, equally, to engage bilaterally (via the English language) with the already well-established field and scholarship on American poetry elsewhere. As such, A merican Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounte ris both product and symptom of the rapidly developing landscape for the scholarship and study of American poetry as the Chinese tertiary education sector advances. At a time of perceived decline in marketability— and funding—for literary study in the West, the popular appre- ciation of American modern and contemporary poetry by Chinese students and scholars is growing. So, too, scholars researching on China and American poetry from outside Asia are beginning to connect their own research to the best writing and research coming from China. I t may be naïve to suppose, however, that simply engaging in bilat- eral dialogue with Chinese scholars will be sufficient to achieve a 2 ● Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie truly transnational literary study that more capably reflects the axial tilt of our planet toward the sinographic. 2 In order to be truly effec- tive, dialogue bridging polarizing tendencies within literary criti- cism, whether anglocentric or sinocentric, will require ever-greater numbers of anglophone scholars to undertake work and study in China, including beginning the lifelong learning process of learning to read and write in Chinese.3 Transnational literary study requires an honest and sincere commitment to acquiring at least some degree of fluency in the Chinese language and, with it, access to a radically different worldview—as no longer merely the recognition of the for- eign, but familiarization with it in an era of rapid globalization. A ccordingly, the “China” that emerges in the following essays is reimagined as both historical and metaphorical by scholars who pos- sess “a healthy respect for the power of texts to shape realities both backward and forward, to create or foreclose possibilities not just of interpretation but of experience.” 4 Indeed, anglophone scholars need to e xperience “China” far more than we/they currently do, by allow- ing the latter to emerge as the thinking “through” of historical and textual difference, including the means by which the “West” has come to know itself as an entity, and with an eye toward converg- ing epistemological horizons.5 The fate of literary transnationalism may depend on this collective enterprise to know “China” better, and peril befalls those who would eschew such a bilateral process. In similar terms, Eric Hayot has written that “the transnational turn . . . does not simply have to be about the United States’ recogni- tion that the rest of the world has something to teach it . . . if that is all it is, the danger, for the turn to China in particular, is that this move outward will simply function as a further index of self-absorption.” 6 Hayot’s categorical warning about hegemonic navel-gazing is at once reflexive and appropriate. He fails to note, however, that the latest rendering of the “transnational turn” not only has occurred from the perspective of frontiering Western scholars and students encountering China as if for the first time but it has also entailed critical reassessment by China-based scholars who are themselves keen to assist in the formation of discourses of and about “China” at once moored to the historical China and proliferating apart from it.

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.