Date of Award

6-11-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

First Advisor

David Chinitz

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which Chinese mythology has figured in American poetry, focusing particularly on the ways Chinese mythologies have served—and continue to serve—as “hitching posts,” quasi-material sites from which meaning can be created and explored. As I am defining it, a myth is a narrative that gives meaning to a lived experience. It explains what we commemorate and worship and renders meaningful both celebration and life. In the first three chapters of this study, I discuss the ways in which Chinese myths and cultural practices have been both used as hitching posts and appropriated by American poets and artists of non-Chinese descent in order to contend with feelings of political and spiritual dislocation, normative constructions of gender and femininity, and anti-Black racism. I then pivot to American poets’ engagements with East Asian spiritual practices, which produced a cognitive disconnect that allowed the American readership to abstract itself from the plight of Chinese immigrants to the United States, even as it produced an interest in the literature, religion, and mythology of classical China. I extend this argument into my final chapter, in which I claim that unlike the U.S. poets who place their focus on classical China, overlooking U.S. immigrant communities, contemporary American poets, particularly those of Chinese descent, use myth to engage with geopolitical China and geopolitical Chinese communities in meaningful ways. Writers studied in this dissertation include Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Jenny Xie, and Li-Young Lee.

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