Writing beyond the nation

: globality, aesthetics, and the Asian American novel, 2000-2010

Abstract

This study explores how innovations, formal qualities, and thematic choices reveal the globality found in the twenty-first century Asian American novel, and the aesthetic terms through which this visibility happens. Among the several volumes of full-length critical investigations of the Asian American novel’s literary aesthetics since 2010, two have most influenced this dissertation’s approach: Betsy Huang’s Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (2010) studies how writers disrupt genre conventions in popular fiction, and Christopher Lee’s The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (2012) examines the nature of Asian American identity. My study continues along these lines of inquiry, and investigates the formal qualities of Asian American novels across four genres (literary realist, historical, political, and graphic) through readings of Sea of Poppies (2008), World and Town (2010), I Hotel (2010), and Shortcomings (2004). The Asian American novel embraces the following ideas and/or techniques across the genres: characterizations marked by polyculturalism, World Englishes, visual negative space and textual silence to highlight racial strife, and the foregrounding of setting as a heterotopia of home and nation both metaphoric and real. For the purposes of literary criticism, this study uses a theoretical premise that conceives of Asian America itself as a work of art, and in so doing, shows how these works subvert, disrupt, delight, and affirm their position as a complex nexus of aesthetic experience that expands and influences American literature. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, these novels are revealed as art objects with distinctive qualities that emphasize the complications of global modernity in what many term “The Asian Century.”

Date of Award	16 Feb 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Rocio G DAVIS (Supervisor) & Y-Dang TROEUNG (Supervisor)