East-West Literary Imagination: Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison (Volume 1)

Description

This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac. Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges. Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Part One: Transcendentalists 1. Henry David Thoreau and Confucian Ethics 2. The Poetics of Subjectivity: Emerson, Zen, and Lacan 3. Emerson, Whitman, and Zen Aesthetics Part Two: Modernists 4. W. B. Yeats’s Poetics in the Noh Play 5. Yone Noguchi, Ezra Pound, and Imagism 6. Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Richard Wright’s The Outsider 7. Richard Wright’s Haiku and Modernist Poetics 8. Jack Kerouac’s Haiku, Beat Poetics, and On the Road Part Three: African American Writers 9. The Western and Eastern Thoughts of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 10. Pagan Spain: Richard Wright’s Discourse on Religion, Politics, and Culture 11. Private Voice and Buddhist Enlightenment in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple 12. Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and African Culture 13. African American Haiku: Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel Notes Works Cited Index