Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

Browse

Filters

Settings

Subject: search.filters.subject.Asian American literature

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Troubling English: Reading Li-Young Lee’s Rose as Minor Literature
    (英語學系, 2013-09-??) Donna T. Tong
    In Rose, Li-Young Lee employs a poetics that plays on and with language which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of a minor literature can help to illuminate. In particular, the poem “Persimmons” with its themes of family, memory, and language condenses various counter-hegemonic strategies. Lee’s poetics defamiliarizes English as a language, drawing attention to its constructedness and thereby exposing the inherently political interconnections of language teaching, language usage and racial hegemony. Lee defamiliarizes English in order to lay bare its senses of alienation and exile. Thus in “Persimmons” the poet shows us the precise linguistic and cultural processes through which persimmons are deterritorialized and reterritorialized. These tactics and concerns are broadly resonant with, and also critique, the ways in which Asians in America are imagined as Asian Americans; they provide us with a lens which focuses on this hybrid category qua category and refracts it. Here then I will analyze Lee’s poetry not only in terms of its mechanics and content but also as being broadly resonant with the ways in which Asians in America are imagined as Asian Americans, that is, as part of a racial order and the place of language in that matrix.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Judging the Book by Its Cover: Phantom Asian America in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth
    (英語學系, 2013-09-??) Begoña Simal-González
    Within the ongoing debate about what constitutes Asian America, recent “transracial adoption narratives” both act as a litmus test for “Asian Americanness” and introduce the ultimate Asian American phantom. Adoptees from Asia who find themselves in America, as new members of non-Asian families, may or may not feel Asian American, but they certainly “look the part.” In literary texts too, such adoptee characters represent the phantasmatic other for “true” Asian Americans, since they openly defy biologist assumptions underlying racial categories. Among Asian American adoption stories, Monique Truong’s recent novel Bitter in the Mouth (2010) is a case in point, in which its narrative complexity precisely highlights the issue of what constitutes Asian America. Truong’s stance in the novel apparently wavers between the quest for the primordial “fixed origins,” so common among adoption narratives, and a calculated elusiveness, translated in fictitious stories of origins. In this peculiar quest, the protagonist’s racialized body is silenced for most of the novel. It may be argued that the narrative strategy chosen by Truong, by withholding, if not erasing, the “racial traces” in the text, actually foregrounds the very issue of “race.” At the same time, Truong’s avowed aim in writing this novel is to move from such one-dimensional understandings of human identity. For that purpose, she chooses to highlight synesthesia as the most defining feature in the protagonist. I will examine whether this strategy is successful and what consequences it has for our understanding of Asian America.