Innovations and exclusions: The incorporation of Chinese literature in modern American poetry

From haikus to ghazals, traditional Asian poetry has brought significant changes to American literature during the twentieth century. However, standard American literary histories depict the driving force of these cross-cultural poetics not as coming from Asian Americans asserting a cultural heritage, but from attempts by Anglo-American poets to transform English literature. Focusing specifically on uses of Chinese literature, my dissertation, Exclusions and Innovations: The Incorporation of Chinese Literature in Modern American Poetry, questions this history by assessing how Chinese culture is represented in the experimentation of avant-garde poets (innovations), and the writings of marginalized Chinese immigrants (exclusions). I use this comparative model to demonstrate how Chinese literature in the form of translations, imitations, and allusions has become familiar within American poetry, yet at the same time the intertextual travel traces an erasure of Chinese immigrant culture that resulted from the Chinese Exclusion Acts and other anti-Chinese legislation in the US (1882--1965).;I begin my investigation with the chapter "National Marginalia: Angel Island Poetry and American Modernism," demonstrating that the Angel Island poems (written on the walls of the barracks of the immigration station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay between 1910 and 1941 by detained Chinese immigrants) are examples of the tibishi, or "wall literature," subgenre. Through traditional literary conventions the poets are able to annunciate the disjunctions of imperialism, modernization, revolution, and nationalism. As inscriptions, their poetry would be monumentalized as a collective memory, allowing the poems to serve as a "witness to history" in both Chinese (revolutionary) and American (ethnic) national historiographies.;The second chapter, "Ezra Pound's Cathay: Chinese Literature Lost in Translation," examines the famous, and influential work that made traditional Chinese appear "natural" in modern American poetry---Ezra Pound's 1915 modernist anthology of traditional Chinese poems, Cathay. I argue that in Cathay, Pound performs the role of cultural authority, signifying on the work of Orientalists ranging from Marco Polo to Ernest Fenollosa within a body of Chinese poetry that he uses to demonstrate his modernist poetics. For Pound to assume the simultaneous roles of speaking for China as an Orientalist and as a performer of Chinese culture, China had to exist, paradoxically, as a "third" space outside European and American traditions.;I shift my focus in the third chapter, "H.T. Tsiang's Poems of the Chinese Revolution and the Modern Chinese/American Poem," from avant-garde modernism of the Great War to populist modernism of the American left, examining poetry that Cary Nelson labels as America's "revolutionary memory." H.T. Tsiang's 1929 Poems of the Chinese Revolution , as I argue, is a rare image of the pre-Mao Chinese communist revolution in the late 1920s, connecting the abject conditions of Chinese living in the United States to America's capitalist and imperial presence in China. H.T. Tsiang's poetry represents one of the only instances of Chinese May Fourth literature in modern American poetry, characterizing China as well as Chinese poetry as modern.;In Chapter 4, "Gary Snyder's Cold Mountain: Chinese Poems for a Cold War," I evaluate Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems how the "third" space of China represented by the tradition of the Cathay-style Orientalism had been reclaimed as an experimental "Beat" aesthetic to resist American domestic containment culture of the Cold War.;Exlusions and Innovations closes with a discussion of recent Asian American poets who use poetry to articulate the disconnections between the discursive China of the modernist tradition and the recovered legacies of marginalized Chinese-American writings. As Asian American literature emerged as part of a cultural nationalist movement, novels such as The Woman Warrior have been championed as signifying the arrival of Asian American writers in American literature. At the same time poetry has been for the most part disregarded, revealing the privileging of the novel as more typically "American." Using Steven Yao's typology of hybridity in Asian American poetry, I examine the poetry of Marilyn Chin and Shirley Lim Geok-Lin as responses to the "naturalization" of Chinese literature in the United States within an Orientalist tradition, at a time when such naturalization was impossible for Chinese immigrants. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...