The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history of American poetry and poetics by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent philosophical term, "emptiness," as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections: The first focuses on "transpacific Buddhist poetics," while the second maps the less well-known terrain of "transpacific Daoist poetics." In Chapters One and Two, I explore Ernest Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" as an expression of his distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo ("New Buddhism") but in Chapter Two I also explore the Classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of his essay. Chapter Three concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of "emptiness" in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decade long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip whose "Transpacific Daoist poetics" has been an important fixture in late American poetic modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and Shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. It is my hope that by formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book can make available one of the most important yet largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.
"A beautifully, coherently argued, and well researched book. Stalling goes beyond merely recovering the missing pieces in literary history; he has
instead presented a brand new reading of Fenollosa, making him a key figure in the poetic and philosophical tradition that Stalling has shrewdly described as the 'poetics of emptiness.'"--Yunte Huang, University of California, Santa Barbara
JONATHAN STALLING is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is one of the three co-editors of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition (Fordham 2008)
288 pages
978-0-8232-3144-7, Cloth, $45.00
January 2010
