Necessary figures: Metaphor, irony and parody in the poetry of Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau

This dissertation examines how metaphor, irony and parody function in the work of three contemporary Asian American poets, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau. By coupling formal method with minority text, it counters the tendency within literary studies at large to read minority literature thematically—for example, as transparent autobiography, ethnography, protest manifesto, travel writing, or voice of the native informant. The study also refutes the notion that poetry, often viewed as too “purely literary,” excludes social and political critique.; My main argument is that Lee's, Chin's, and Yau's psychic and material experiences as Chinese American subjects/poets manifest themselves in their writing at the level of language. Metaphor, irony and parody function as necessary manifestations of the effects of extra-literary and literary forces that have shaped their particular histories and as means of mediating those specific historical, cultural and linguistic pressures, such as: growing up the children of immigrants in Pennsylvania, Oregon and Massachusetts; exposure to a non-Western culture, language, and literary tradition; displacement from cultural and linguistic “centers” (Chinese and American); demands of “authenticity” and/or “representativeness” from Asian and American cultures; the effects of racism and assimilation's demands; situating the self in an Anglo-American poetic tradition. In these tropes one sees the concrete mingling of the “aesthetic” and the “political.”; The riven (bifurcated and multiply split) structures of metaphor, irony and parody echo and reproduce Asian American subjectivity and the split structures of those pressures, desires and aporias that contribute towards the constitution of these subjectivities. For example, metaphor's almost-but-not-quite nature parallels the structure of the poet's relationship to a Chinese cultural past and the logic of assimilation; irony's multiple voices mimic and serve as means of expression for the Chinese American female poet negotiating the strictures of assimilation and the demands of cultural, racial, and linguistic authenticity; parody both internalizes and undermines dominant discourses, such as Hollywood stereotypes of “Orientals,” and norms.; While this dissertation focuses on three specific Chinese American poets, it holds implications not only for reading other Asian American, minority and diasporic poets, but also for re-thinking Anglo-American poetry and the relationship between aesthetic figurations and a larger world “out there.”...