作品情報

「リテラリー・チャイナタウン」の外へ、批評の視野を押し広げる。

中国系アメリカ文学が「特定の場所」に閉じ込められてきた経緯をたどりながら、読者、出版社、書評の関係を読み解く。文学研究と文化研究の接点に立つ本。

書籍情報

出版社

Univ of Washington Pr

発売日

2007-04-30

ページ数

246ページ

言語

英語

サイズ

15.77 x 1.6 x 21.95 cm

ISBN-13

9780295987064

ISBN-10

0295987065

価格

6775 JPY

カテゴリ

洋書/Literature & Fiction/World Literature

American 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, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and David Wong Louie are aware of their readers' horizons and write to challenge those assumptions, Partridge demonstrates how their writings function as a potent medium of cultural transformation. With attentive readings not only of literary texts but also of book reviews and publishers' marketing materials, Partridge enables us to chart and to understand the changes in Chinese American literature and its reception in the past fifty years. In doing so, he threads a new path forward in the discussion of race and ethnicity in America, one that encompasses the historical valence of multiculturalism and the cross-fertilizing perspectives of postmodern hybridity theory while remaining cognizant of the persistence of racist and racialized thinking in contemporary American society. Beyond Literary Chinatown demonstrates how Chinese American literature has come to negotiate the tensions between the expression of ethnic identity and a resistance to racialization. This important contribution to the growing body of critical works on Asian American literature will be of interest to reception theorists and scholars of American ethnic studies and American literature.

Jeffrey F. L. Partridge has taught Asian American literature at the National University of Singapore, Central Connecticut State University, and the University of Connecticut. He currently coordinates the Liberal Arts and Sciences program for Capital Community College in Hartford, Connecticut.

関連する文学賞

• アメリカン・ブック・アワード 第28回（2007年） ・Winner