Description
Book SynopsisAmerican Book Award Winner (Before Columbus Foundation)
The phenomenon of literary Chinatown--the ghettoization of Chinese American literature--was produced by the same dynamics of race and representation that ghettoized the Chinese American community into literal Chinatowns. In a 1982 response to reviews of Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston pinpointed the crux of the matter: How dare they make their ignorance our inscrutability!
Jeffrey F. L. Partridge examines the dynamic relationship between reader expectations of Chinese American literature and the challenges to these expectations posed by recent Chinese American texts, challenges that push our understanding of a multicultural society to new horizons. Partridge builds on the concept of a reading horizon--a set of expectations and assumptions that a reader brings to a text--to explore the crucial interplay between reader, author, and text. Arguing that authors like Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Shawn Wong,
Trade Review
"Partridge offers a spirited approach to an important set of questions, and he substantiates his case with a persuasive set of careful close readings…. Partridge's book offers an undeniably useful point of reference for future mediations on the role of formal analysis in Asian American literary criticism, and future scholars will do well to consider his work thoroughly."
* MELUS *
"Beyond Literary Chinatown is highly recommended for readers interested in the politics of canon formation as well as in the ideological negotiations that must necessarily transpire as a 'minority' literature strives for topicality and relevance in both national and transnational contexts."
* Amerasia Journal *
"In exploring practices of reading and writing, Partridge analyzes commonplace claims about the critical reception of these texts as well as how authors respond to such reception within their texts. Rather than posit either the audience or the text as final arbiter of meaning, he explores how reader's expectations about the text and author interact with the text to generate moments of intelligibility, misreadings, and subversive possibilities. He thoughtfully turns to a range of prose and poetry texts as well extra-textual material for evidence to support these claims about the dynamics of meaningmaking. . . .This book contributes substantively to the work of Asian American literary studies in understanding how Chinese American literature moves in the world outside its academic reception."
* Modern Fiction Studies *
"Partridge's conclusions deserve serious development for their transnational resonance. This is a compelling, valuable, and provocative study. Recommended."
* Choice *
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Horizons
Part One | Literary Chinatown and the Reader's Horizon
1. Literary Chinatown: Dynamics of Race and Reading
2. What Is an Ethnic Author?
Part Two | Exceeding the Margins
3. The Politics of Ethnic Authorship: Li-Young Lee, Emerson, and Whitman at the Banquet Table
4. Claiming Diaspora in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Joss and Gold
Part Three | Change and the Phenomenology of Reading
5. Changing Signifiers and Changing Horizons: Baseball in Three Stories by David Wong Louie
6. Change and the Playful Reader: Reading Shawn Wong's American Knees
Part Four | Reading New Horizons
7. Beyond Multicultural: Cultural Hybridity in the Novels of Gish Jen
Conclusion: The Emergence of the Polycultural
Notes
Bibliography
Index
