The Malleability of Truth and Language in Chay Yew’s Porcelain and A Language of Their Own

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-314
Author(s):  
Quan-Manh Ha ◽  
Andrew Vigesaa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Western World ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
Asian Men ◽  
The Status

Abstract In Asian American literature and drama, the pursuit of identity was at the forefront of discussion for much of the twentieth century. More and more frequently Asian American voices from the LGBTQ community have addressed intersectionality in established narratives. As issues of identity and intersectionality converge, postmodernity becomes a useful lens through which to examine the elements of this task. In Chay Yew’s plays entitled Porcelain and A Language of Their Own, the status of Asian identities in the Western world is not given a sure footing, but rather it is placed in a state of confusion. In Porcelain, this confusion stems from the tension between objective truth and the postmodern phenomenon of media-fueled panic. In A Language of Their Own, similar confusion arises between the subjective and performative conveying of meaning in language. These contrasting elements serve to highlight the postmodern search for identity among Asian men living in the Western world, where the complexities of identity are compounded by the subjectivity of truth.

scholarly journals The Role of Anthologies in Developing Approaches to The Study of Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Contemporary American Literature ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Asian Descent ◽  
The Status ◽  
Asian American Identity

The article reviews the role and position of the first anthologies of American literature written by writers of Asian descent, due to which the outlines for what are now commonly known as Asian American literary studies were defined. A close analysis of these anthologies enables to realize why the existence of a unified collective Asian American identity, which was proclaimed in the second half of the 20th century, is being questioned at the milestone of the 20th and 21st centuries. It gives reason to state that the anthologies did not only emphasize the status quo of literature created by American writers of Asian descent, but also formed fracture lines along which at the end of the 20th century efforts were made to deprive Asian-American literature of the status of marginal, secondary and present it as a full-fledged component of American literary continuum. The first one can be described as “beyond the hyphen”. The second trajectory of the search for a way out of ethnic shelter at the end of the 20th century is aimed at “reconfiguring the canon”. It involves not only a demand of being fully involved into the American literary tradition, but also a search for its role in shaping, if not generating contemporary American literature. The anthologies that hold the primacy in the discovery of American writers of Asian descent, as a literary fact on one side, were both a continuation and rethinking of the tradition of Eastern (Chinese/Japanese) anthologies. On the other hand, despite the extremely compressed theoretical foundation for the essence of this wing of American literature, they show the extent and dynamism of its understanding and interpretation as an integral part of Western literary discourse.

Can You Tell by Looking? A Postvisible Definition of Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-569
Author(s):  
Sue-Im Lee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Real Definition ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract This essay identifies a need for a postvisible definition of Asian American literature. Traditionally Asian American literature has been identified by the racial descent of the writer and recognizable “Asian American” content, but such qualifications are no longer sufficient and prompt the question, “But is it Asian American?” In order to theorize a postvisible definition, this essay engages twentieth-century philosophy of art to delineate three distinct approaches to definition in Asian American literary history: a “real” definition in its founding period that pursued exactitude and empiricism in substantiating a new category of art called Asian American literature, to an anti-definition in the 1990s, and to the pluralist, nonnormative definition since 2000 in which identifying a text as Asian American is an exercise in persuasively situating the text within the Asian American literary artworld, not in identifying visibly “detectible” properties.

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Ladyga
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Value System ◽  
John Barth ◽  
The Status ◽  
Twentieth Century American Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Moment

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on the issue of productivity, using the figure of laziness to negotiate the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic. This book argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness. Ladyga argues that when the motif of laziness appears, it invariably reveals the underpinnings of an emerging value system at a given historical moment, while at the same time offering a glimpse into the strategies of rebelling against the status quo

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