Imagining the Radical Middle: Asian Philosophy and Contemporary American Avant-garde Poetry

This dissertation contributes to the newly emerging research field of “Transpacific Studies,” whose interdisciplinary approach is meant to shed light on the dynamic interactions between countries on the Pacific Rim. Reflecting this transpacific turn in academic research, I examine four contemporary American poets whose literary innovations are rooted in the Buddhist and Daoist lineages of Asian philosophy. While examining the chosen poets’ texts as heterocultural forms of East-West dialogue, I criticize previous reading models that often dismiss the Western transformation of Asian sources simply as “inauthentic,” “fictional,” or even “orientalist fantasy.” American avant-garde poetry, I argue, can be read more productively when we consider it as a radically contextual space in which foreign signifiers are leaping, curving, clashing, resounding, and displacing themselves boundlessly. Referring to such a non-hierarchical, palimpsestic textual space, I propose “a poetics of the radical middle,” a term I draw from the Buddhist concept of sunyata or “emptiness.” Ultimately, through the experimental texts of four American poets, I seek to provide a new reading model for transnational literary studies by taking the transpacific as an important site for literary innovation. While complementing recent studies on transpacific American literature and culture, my work goes beyond them in investigating the positive social changes that poetic texts can promote as we reconceive nation, citizenship, racial identity, ethnic diversity, and gender equality.