East-West Literary Imagination Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison / Yoshinobu Hakutani.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hakutani, Yoshinobu.

Language:

English

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st edition.

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2017

Place of Publication:

Columbia, MO : University of Missouri Press, 2016.

Summary:

This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac. Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.

Contents:

Pt. One Transcendentalists

1. Henry David Thoreau and Confucian Ethics

2. The Poetics of Subjectivity: Emerson, Zen, and Lacan

3. Emerson, Whitman, and Zen Aesthetics

pt. Two Modernists

4. W. B. Yeats's Poetics in the Noh Play

5. Yone Noguchi, Ezra Pound, and Imagism

6. Albert Camus's The Stranger and Richard Wright's The Outsider

7. Richard Wright's Haiku and Modernist Poetics

8. Jack Kerouac's Haiku, Beat Poetics, and On the Road

pt. Three African American Writers

9. The Western and Eastern Thoughts of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

10. Pagan Spain: Richard Wright's Discourse on Religion, Politics, and Culture

11. Private Voice and Buddhist Enlightenment in Alice Walker's The Color Purple

12. Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and African Culture

13. African American Haiku: Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780826273949

0826273947

OCLC:

988022060