Experiments with China in American Modernity
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Date
2024-01-09
Authors
Lester, Jason
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Experiments with China in American Modernity explores formulations of China within America’s early and interwar modernist period. I propose the concept of “transpacific experimentalism” to identify an emergent, sustained aesthetic engagement with China, grounded in empiricist, scientistic, or otherwise humanist claims, which can be understood through John Dewey’s theory of creative imagination. This dissertation resonates with the continuing expansion of new modernist studies, offering new methodological approaches and archival challenges to a field which has been historically constricted to a narrow high modernist canon. By tracing a constellation of texts situated on the disciplinary interstices of modernist studies, Chinese area studies, and Asian American studies, I do not intend to further horizontally expand the category of American modernism, but to reveal the extent to which it has always already been historically, culturally, and aesthetically transpacific–a term which, following Hua Hsu, “describes a physical space” connecting the United States to Asia, “as well as a horizon of possibility.” From the transpacific birth and circuits of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine and Ezra Pound’s living Chinese character, to Witter Bynner’s collaboration with Jiang Kanghu and the recovery of Sino-US poets and scholars of American modernism, this dissertation argues for a new mode of reading which unearths the horizontal aesthetic relations which emerged across American and Chinese modernity.
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Keywords
aesthetic theory, Anglo-American modernism, Chinese studies, global modernism, modernist and contemporary poetry, transpacific studies