The Asian American object: Aesthetic mediation and the ethics of writing (Eileen Chang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje).

摘要

This dissertation argues that the political and ethical objectives of Asian American Studies have determined the ways in which its object of analysis has been constituted. I contend that the field's investment in identity politics has resulted in reading practices that privilege a normative realism while consistently overlooking the significance of the aesthetic as a cognitive mode. As a result, literary works are typically interpreted in a manner that is unable to account for the non-mimetic aspects of language. Drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and others, I theorize the significance of literature in Ethnic Studies and argue for the centrality of aesthetic mediation in the production of knowledge.; Through readings of texts by Eileen Chang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Michael Ondaatje, I trace how their mimetic logics are ruptured by the intrusion of aesthetic figures and practices. I read Chang's anti-Communist novel, The Rice-Sprout Song (1954) by focusing on her engagement with propaganda as a pseudo-aesthetic practice that conflicts with the demands of realism. I argue that she undermines the ethnographic expectations of her readers by re-defining realism in terms of sensuality and psychological complexity. In the next chapter, I examine how musical tropes articulate the values of community formation in Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989). By tracking how music is subsequently "transcribed" into signifying language, I show how her engagement with the act of writing demonstrates an understanding of US multiculturalism that differs from prevalent materialist critiques of the same. In my final chapter, I read Lee's A Gesture Life (1999) along with Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (2000) and show how these novels explore the relationship between historical memory and identity formation. I contend that both texts turn to aesthetic modes in order to articulate the ethical stakes and utopian possibilities of identity.