Figures of identity: Rereading Asian American literature

This dissertation places itself in the tradition of the "defense of poetry," a reference to the well-known Renaissance essay by Sir Philip Sidney, to reframe the critical reading practices of Asian American literary studies, which has been dominated by historical or sociological approaches to literary phenomena. In this formula, Asian American texts refer unproblematically to Asian American subjects. Against this critical tendency to privilege the quantitative or the thematic, the dissertation proposes instead a reading practice that attends to the "literary." In taking the stance that literature is unquestionably related to the world, it makes the claim that reading "literarily" can help us think "politics" better, and argues for a robust literary formalism anchored by close readings of formal elements in both literary texts and their historical and political contexts. Setting itself against the tendency to view Asian American texts as identity narratives, this project capitalizes on the conventional association of the literary with a surplus of meaning, and fixes its attention on what it calls the "figures of identity" where no such identity emerges in the shuttling between the semantic and rhetorical possibilities.; In close readings of the key texts of the Asian American canon, texts that have been especially subjected to such literalist readings, the dissertation shows the complexity and sophistication of the Asian American literary tradition, and argues that this richness has been diminished by the prevailing critical reading practices. In formal readings of Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poesy" with Lawson Inada's introduction to the novel No-No Boy, Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables" with John Okada's novel No-No Boy, Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men with Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, the dissertation examines how these texts deploy highly stylized gestures to stage questions of history, identity and reading. The literary figures they offer give us far more complex tropes for thinking identity and history, and in many cases, challenge and undo those entities altogether.