The object of experiment: Figurations of subjectivity in Asian American experimental literatur

This dissertation, The Object of Experiment: Figurations of Subjectivity in Asian American Experimental Literature, explores how experimental forms interrogate critical interpretive practices. Reading works by four Asian American authors---Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, John Yau, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge---the dissertation suggests that contemporary formulations of Asian American literature are insufficient models for understanding the figures of subjectivity presented in these authors' experimental forms. At the same time, the dissertation locates the enactment of these very insufficiencies within the works themselves, proposing that while critics of Asian American literature have only recently begun to theorize the difficulties of representing particular ethnic subjectivities, authors like Cha, Kim, Yau, and Berssenbrugge have already established, in their creative work, figures through which those questions are embodied, enacted, and framed. Finally, this dissertation suggests that if these works are to provide possible insight into future theoretical formulations of Asian American literature, attempts at their interpretation must honor, rather than overwrite, the various difficulties encountered.;The first chapter, "Address unknown: the inarticulate subject of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE," uses Cha's DICTEE as an exemplary text through which the deployment of experimental form problematizes and challenges recent critical re-inscriptions of Cha's work as specifically Asian American.;The second chapter, "Making common the commons: Myung Mi Kim's Ideal Subject," explores the relationship between language as an ideal "commons," and act of making "common" the textual disruptions through which language's ideality is elided. This chapter questions the ease with which critics apply labels of "Asian American" to authors whose work is premised on a interrogation of such categories.;The third chapter, "Of visible selves: the subject(ed) subject in John Yau's poetry," links questions of production and representation to debates about the import of 'visible' ethnicity. This chapter details how the expectation of ethnic transparency influences various critical frameworks, including Asian American literary criticism.;The final chapter, "Stock exchanges: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's essential subject," re-thinks the recent critical turn away from 'essential' subjects, and suggests that the wholesale dismissal of such concepts may force an unnecessary connection between imagined figurations and textual simplicity.