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The Incorporation of Chinese Literature in Modern American Poetry INNOVATIONS AND EXCLUSIONS: THE INCORPORATION OF CHINESE LITERATURE IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY By JAMES INNIS MCDOUGALL A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2007 1 © 2007 James Innis McDougall 2 To Liulu and Colin 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank Liulu for sustaining this project by pointing to dreams that shift and reform again and again like clouds on far horizons, turning the constant trudge on the everyday cracked concrete to a dance upon the grace notes of Fortuna’s strathspeys (a strathspey is a working song, such that as you labor the music coaxes you along). Wee Colin, xiao Benzheng, the early one, I want to thank for showing me the conspiracy of ocean currents in one caul- obscured wail. I am grateful always to my mother, father, brothers, sister, brother-in-law, nieces, and nephews for the endless lessons in poetics—Here’s tae us! Wha’s like us!?! Damn few and they’re a’ deid! I offer my deepest, most sincere thanks to my dissertation committee chair, Marsha Bryant, who led me to the gates of this word horde, piloting me through many a treacherous byway, and for giving me a true apprenticeship in the crafts of scholarship and writing. Finally, I would like to thank C.K. Shih, Malini Schueller, and Susan Hegeman; it is an honor and a privilege to work with them; their encouragement, questions, insights, and guidance helped me to mature as a scholar. I cannot thank them enough for their confidence in my project, which for a space was all that held all these pages together. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..............................................................................................................4 LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................7 ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................................8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................12 2 NATIONAL MARGINALIA: WALL LITERATURE OF ANGEL ISLAND AS MODERN AMERICAN POETRY ........................................................................................31 Borders, Boycotts, and Revolution.........................................................................................33 Traditional Chinese Forms .....................................................................................................44 Identification and Modern National Identity ..........................................................................65 Angel Island Modernism ........................................................................................................71 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................85 3 LOST IN TRANSLATION: CHINESE PERSONAE AND MODERNIST INVENTION IN CATHAY .....................................................................................................87 Cathay and Pound’s Orienting of Modernism........................................................................90 Cathay in Context...................................................................................................................92 Poetry as Art Object...............................................................................................................102 Personae and Invention in Cathay .........................................................................................112 Conclusion: Cathay and the American Poem........................................................................138 4 H.T. TSIANG’S POEMS OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION: WHITMAN, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND THE MODERN CHINESE/AMERICAN POEM..................145 Revolutionary Beginnings .....................................................................................................146 Race, Labor, and Revolution .................................................................................................151 A Poetics of the Hypocolony.................................................................................................154 Bringing the May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Revolution to America.....................159 May Fourth Whitman.............................................................................................................172 Conclusion: Revolution and the Racial Frontier ...................................................................188 5 GARY SNYDER’S RIPRAP AND COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS IN 1950S CONTAINMENT CULTURE: THE POETICS OF SHAN SHUI TIBISHI AND THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION................................................................................................193 Domestic Containment as Beat..............................................................................................194 Cold Mountain Tibishi...........................................................................................................203 5 Traditional Chinese Literature and Snyder’s Innovations.....................................................208 Cold Mountain: Postmodern Exclusions ...............................................................................225 Conclusion: Innovations and Exclusions in the Cold War ....................................................227 6 CONCLUSION......................................................................................................................232 LIST OF REFERENCES..............................................................................................................261 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................................................273 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 2-1 Postcard of Chinatown before the fire of 1906.................................................................51 3-1 Cover of Cathay.................................................................................................................102 3-2 “Song of the Bowmen of Shu” from Fenollosa’s notebook..............................................114 4-1 Chinese coolie laborers contracted by British in Southeast Asia.....................................155 4-2 Foreign-run factory in China ............................................................................................155 4-3 Poems of the Chinese Revolution Cover Art by Robert Minor..........................................186 5-1 “Han Shan and Shi De” .....................................................................................................220 6-1 “Qiu Jin in ‘Man’s Suit’”...................................................................................................244 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy INNOVATIONS AND EXCLUSIONS: THE INCORPORATION OF CHINESE LITERATURE IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY By James Innis McDougall May 2007 Chair: Marsha Bryant Major: English 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). While Chinese-language texts written in America have failed to receive a close study, because they are often treated exclusively as displaced Chinese literature, I argue that they are central to understanding the heterogeneity of American modernism. Moreover, the cultural history of Chinese literature as it has appeared in 8 American poetry reveals the tensions between anti-colonialism and imperialism found not only within American literary texts, but also within the institutionalization of American literature. 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)
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