Overview
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Literatures in English at Cornell University, where I am completing my dissertation, Inexactly Contemporaneous: The Oriental Novel Form and the Suspended Coeval Poetics of Younghill Kang, H. T. Tsiang, and Sadakichi Hartmann, under the direction of Professor Laura Brown. My research examines the intersection between Asian American Literature, Twentieth-Century American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literary Modernism, culminating in a close-reading methodology that reframes Asian American and transpacific modernism through what I call a poetics of co-development.
By a “poetics of co-development,” my dissertation seeks to name a representational strategy across minor literatures that resists the canonical demand for “exact contemporaneity” within Euro-American modernism. Reading Kang’s East Goes West (1937), Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square (1935), and Hartmann’s The Last Thirty Days of Christ (1920), I show how each writer mobilized autobiographical modes and experimental narrative forms to stage suspended or deferred coeval encounters with future readers less beholden to the regionalist biases and critical orthodoxies of their times. Together, these chapters build toward a new account of the “Oriental Novel Form” as a crucial but underrecognized strand of American modernist literary history, one that unsettles the hypotactic temporality of canon formation through experimental narrative representational strategies that foreground a transnational and transimperial context yet to be fully realized within the regionalist and nationalist confines of their contemporaneous milieu.
My dissertation develops this framework across three chapters:
- Chapter 1: “The Deferred Coeval Poetics of East Goes West” demonstrates how Kang’s narrative and syntactic experimentation articulates an “inexactly contemporaneous” temporality that unsettles Euro-American modernism’s canonizing demand for synchronicity, most significantly through literary citation and syntactic play.
- Chapter 2: “Grouching as Global Proletarian Poetics of Refusal” examines how Tsiang’s practice of “grouching” reimagines proletarian literature as a form of asynchronous refusal, exposing the structural limits of leftist publishing networks who refused to print his work on the basis that they were not “realist” enough.
- Chapter 3: “Reclaiming Christ’s Parables as Modernist Literary Form” analyzes Hartmann’s The Last Thirty Days of Christ to show how his experimental deployment of the parable functions as an “impressionist” modernist form. In doing so, he stages belated and suspended coeval encounters across religious and aesthetic discourses, bridging his esteemed career as an American art critic into paratactic simultaneity alongside his neglected contributions as a modernist writer.
Together, these chapters argue that Kang, Tsiang, and Hartmann refashion the exclusionary laws, logics, and expectations of American Orientalism to develop what I call the Oriental Novel Form—a mode of American modernist writing that converts exclusion into deferred or failed coevalities for readers yet to come.
An early draft of my chapter on Kang appears in preprint form in the Humanities Commons:
https://works.hcommons.org/records/2njbn-91m37
Research Focus
- Asian American Studies
- 20th Century Modernist Literature
- Theories of Temporality
- Narrative Form
- Close Reading