The poetics of displacement: Ethnography, translation, and intertextual travel in twentieth-century American literature (Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, John Yau, Maxine Hong Kingston, Pearl S. Buck)

In the intertextual space of twentieth-century American literature, America's imagination of the Far East has created heavy traffic in the migration of cultural meanings. Such dislocation is manifest especially in the intertextual inventions of Oriental culture, including Imagism (Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell), Asian American literature (John Yau and Maxine Hong Kingston), and trans-Pacific writings (Pearl Buck and American translations of Chinese literature). Along these trans-Pacific routes, intertextuality remains both a textual and cultural space in which a text absorbs and transforms other texts that exhibit a variety of language practices—familiar or foreign, privileged or marginalized. Literature's description or placement of a culture thus entails an intertextual displacement. The larger theme of the dissertation is to engage with the nativist orientations in American literary studies and to argue for a literature that is emergent from national and language boundaries.