On The Father Image In Li-Young Lee’s Rose

Li-Young Lee is an outstanding contemporary Chinese American poet in America. Lee’s poems are filled with themes of simplicity, strength, and silence. All are strongly influenced by his family history, childhood, and individuality. He writes with simplicity and passion which creates images that take the reader deeper and also requires his audience to fill in the gaps with their own imagination.Rose, Lee’s first poem anthology, published in 1986, is a polished, professional and deeply absorbing poem connection. In these poems Lee writes a lot about his father, nature, fruit, and coming to America from China and feeling like an outsider. The ever-present father figure is one key to this poem anthology. This is not a quaint and literary father figure he is writing and thinking about. It is instead a real father, an extraordinary and heroic figure. It is the critical event, the critical "myth" in Lee’s poetry. As the poet Gerald Stern wrote in the foreword of Rose, Lee, as a poet, is lucky to have had the father he had and the culture he had.This thesis is based on the father image in Lee’s Rose to analyze his father—a mythical figure in Lee’s poems in order to investigate the ethic and poetic alterity in Lee’s poetry with the theoretic sustentation of E. Levinas. There are four chapters in this thesis. Chapter 1 reveals Levinas’ theory of ethic alterity, the Asian American Poetry actuality and the poets’ development of the particular poetics of alterity. Chapter 2 offers a detailed introduction about the identity and cultural significance of Lee and his father. Chapter 3 reveals the mythical father with the images of traditional Chinese intelligence and heroic saint in Rose. Chapter 4 reveals inventions and. the inheritance of both Chinese culture and American culture in Lee’s Rose. And the conclusion arouses the attention of the critics to the poems of Li-Young Lee and his contribution to Asian American literature.