Poetics of emptiness : transformations of Asian thought in American poetry / Jonathan Stalling.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stalling, Jonathan.

Series:

American Literatures Initiative

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--Chinese influences.

American poetry.

Emptiness (Philosophy).

Philosophy--East Asia.

Philosophy.

Poetics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (284 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on "transpacific Buddhist poetics," while the second maps the less well-known terrain of "transpacific Daoist poetics." In Chapters 1 and 2, the author explores Ernest Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo ("New Buddhism"). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of "emptiness" in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose "transpacific Daoist poetics" has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Prologue: Transformations of a Transpacific Imaginary

Introduction: The Poetics of Emptiness, or a Cult of Nothingness

1 Emptiness in Flux: The Buddhist Poetics of Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”

2 Patterned Harmony: Buddhism, Sound, and Ernest Fenollosa’s Poetics of Correlative Cosmology

3 Teaching the Law: Gary Snyder’s Poetics of Emptiness

4 Language of Emptiness: Wai-lim Yip’s Daoist Project

5 Pacing the Void: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9786613297099

9780823231454

0823231453

9780823244355

0823244350

9780823246489

0823246485

9780823241835

0823241831

9781283297097

1283297094

9780823231461

0823231461

OCLC:

712990679