Multicultural Poetics: Re-visioning the American Canon (Suny Series in Multiethnic Literatures)

"Argues that multiculturalism and hybridity are key components of the nation's poetry and its culture. Multicultural Poetics provides a new perspective on American poetry that will contribute to the evolution of contemporary critical practice. Nissa Parmar combines formalist analysis with cultural studies theory to trace a lineage of hybrid poetry from the American Renaissance to what Marilyn Chin deemed America's "multicultural renaissance," the blossoming of multicultural literature in the 1980s and 1990s. This re-visionary literary history begins by analyzing Whitman and Dickinson as postcolonial poets. This critical approach provides an alternative to the factionalism that has characterized twentieth-century American poetic history and continues to inform literary criticism in the twenty-first century. Parmar uses a multiethnic, multigender method that emphasizes the relationship between American poetic form and cultural development. This book provides a new approach by using hybridity as the critical paradigm for a study that groups multiethnic and emergent authors. It thereby combats literary ghettoization while revealing commonalities across American literatures and the cross-fertilization that has informed their development" -- From the publisher Contents List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments Copyright and Permissions Introduction In “the American Strain” Hybridity American Culture: a History of “Two” “Strains” “A Nation of Nations”? “Nothing is Beyond Poetry” “The Social Function of Poetry” Chapter One: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman The “Beginners” The Hybrid Revolution “Their Presidents Shall Not Be Their Common Referee so Much as Their Poets Shall.” “A Revolution in Form and in the Traditional Conceptions of Literature Itself” “I See—New Englandly” Poetry and “Possibility” “Strange and ‘Dreadful’ to Their Place and Time” Poetic Identity “The Friendly Flowing Savage” “My Business Is Circumference” “Poets to Come” Chapter Two: William Carlos Williams “A Sort of Song” “Saxifrage is My Flower” “Are you for American Poetry or for Poetry?” Hybridity Fellow Revolutionaries A Hybrid Structure to House the American Language “We Cannot go to the Country” Pastorals and Paterson Chapter Three: Adrienne Rich “A Whole New Poetry Beginning Here” A Re-Visionary American Eve “Perpetual Translation” “Sources”: Creating a “Usable Past” Leaflets and Ghazals A “Social Instrument” in the Shape of a Woman Poet “The location of the Poet” Chapter Four: Marilyn Chin “The End of a Beginning” “We are the Ones Who are ‘Making it New’ ” A New American Mode “Blues on Yellow” Poetic Inheritance “A Portrait of the Self as Nation” “Where we Live Now” Chapter Five: Sherman Alexie “Tradition Is Repetition” “The Great American Movie” “Watch This Guy. He’s Making Myth.” “The Reservation of My Mind” “Translated from the American” “Fry Bread Power” Primitive/Progressive Car Wrecks and Ceremonies Dreaming of a “New Shape” Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index