Abstract
This chapter discusses the theory and practice of representation, witnessing Asian perspectives that allow for a widening of the views of mimesis. There is a discussion of the work of a prominent Japanese-Canadian author, Joy Kogawa, and an English translation of a Chinese poet, Bei Dao, who has been in exile. The chapter argues that in these English texts there are still moves and moments of the interaction of East and West. The typology of here and there, now and then affects many writers and readers in a mobile world. This chapter concentrates on the poetics of this mobility and this gain and loss between Asia and the New World and elsewhere.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963), 31–33.
My thanks to Michael Mirolla at Guernica Editions, as well as Sheena Wilson, the editor of the collection, for permission to reprint in a revised form the following: “The Poetics of Moment, Exception, and Indirection in Joy Kogawa’s Poetry and Prose,” in Joy Kogawa: Essays on Her Works, ed. Sheena Wilson (Toronto: Guernica, 2011), 129–58. It is a pleasure to write about Joy Kogawa’s poetry as I first taught Obasan in the early and mid-1980s. Many thanks to Christina Thompson, editor of Harvard Review, for permission to reprint a different version of the piece on Bei Dao that appears online in issue 7 of Harvard Review.
On other Canadian women writers, Native, African and European, see Jonathan Hart, Interpreting Culture: Literature, Religion, and the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), ch. 3.
On Joy Kogawa’s life and work, see Arnold Davidson, Writing Against the Silence: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993);
on comparative poetics, see Patricia Merivale, “Framed Voices: The Polyphonic Elegies of Hebert and Kogawa,” Canadian Literature 116 (Spring 1988), 68–82;
on fiction in a comparison, see King-kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993);
on the historical context, see John Herd Thompson, Ethnic Minorities During Two World Wars, Canada’s Ethnic Groups 19 (Ottawa Canadian Historical Association, 1992).
Joy Kogawa, Jericho Road (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), 21.
Joy Kogawa, A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2003), 3.
Bei Dao, The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 2010).
Copyright information
© 2013 Jonathan Locke Hart
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hart, J. (2013). East-West Poetics. In: Textual Imitation: Making and Seeing in Literature. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137301352_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137301352_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45351-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30135-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)