Focusing on the poetry and cultural practice of Frank O’Hara, the great urban poet of the New York School during the 1950s and 1960s, this books explores the interwoven relationship between his urban poetics and the urban culture of New York, seeking to shed light on poetic concept and its cultural relevance. The poetry of Frank O’Hara is deeply rooted in and nourished by his urban experience as a metropolitan and an active participant in the vibrant cultural scene of New York. Therefore, an investigation into the interactive dynamics between his poetry and the urban culture he helped shape serves as a starting point for further study on the literary representation of European and American urban culture. Across eight chapters, the authors look into the genesis, theoretical constitution, the interface with culture and aesthetics of O’Hara’s urban poetics and also their philosophical foundations, literary ethics, special expression and representation as well as his reception of modernity and postmodernity. The title will appeal to scholars, students and general readers interested in American literature, poetry and urban culture, especially Frank O’Hara and the New York School.

What is the relationship between the spaces we inhabit and the spaces we create? Does living in a messy downtown New York City apartment automatically translate to writing a messy New York School poem? This volume addresses the 'environment' of the urban apartment, illuminating the relationship between the structures of New York City apartments and that of New York School poems. It utilizes the lens of urban and spatial theory to widen the possibilities afforded by New Critical and reader-response readings of this postmodern American poetry. In drawing this connection between consciousness and form, it draws on various senses of the environment as informing influence, inviting avant-garde American poetry to be reconsidered as uniquely organic in its responsiveness to its surroundings. Focusing exclusively and comprehensively on Second Generation New York School poetry, this is the first book-length study to attend to the poetry of this postmodern American movement, encouraging American poetry scholars to resituate New York School poetry within larger critical narratives of postmodern innovation.

This book explores Vladimir Nabokov's literary thoughts, which blend Russian traditions, American values, European heritage, and multiculturalism, manifesting the cosmopolitan character of his writings and aesthetic ideas. Nabokov’s literary thoughts and writings inherit the legacies of various cultural traditions. This book explores four major facets of Nabokov’s intellectual and artistic origins: “Russianness,” “Americanness,” “Europeanness,” and multiculturalism. It discusses his affinity with major trends in twentieth-century literary theory, including Russian formalism, Bakhtinian poetics, New Criticism, aestheticism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural identity. It also shows how Nabokov developed these ideas in his own unique way. In addition, this study provides a cross-cultural overview of his reception and influence in China, comparing his works and thoughts with several Chinese authors. This further illustrates the “cosmopolitanism” of his literary thought and the inclusiveness of his concept of world literature. This study helps to better understand Nabokov’s ideas and writings in a broader context and also to discover innovative approaches to the communication, integration, and complementarity of Western and Eastern literatures and cultures. This book will appeal to literature scholars, students, and anyone interested in Nabokov studies, literary theory, American literature, world literature, and comparative literature.

Combining narratological and stylistic methods, this book theorizes dual narrative dynamics consisting of plot development and covert progression and demonstrates the consequences for the interpretation of literary works. In narratives with such dynamics, writers work simultaneously with overt and covert trajectories of signification, establishing a range of relationships between them. The two parallel narrative movements may complement, contradict or even subvert each other, and these relationships significantly influence readers’ understanding not just of events but also of characters, themes, and aesthetic values. The book provides a systematic theoretical account of such previously neglected dual narrative dynamics, substantiated and enriched by the textual analysis of works by Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Franz Kafka, and Katherine Mansfield. The study explores the many ways that these authors have used dual dynamics to increase the power of their narratives. In addition, the book identifies the challenges such dual dynamics present not only for narratology but also for stylistics and translation studies, and it develops sound and provocative proposals for meeting those challenges. In taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of narrative and literary theory, literary criticism, literary stylistics, and translation studies.

This book engages with the critical decline of postmodernism and newer currents of thinking that have come to the fore, including postcolonialism, feminism, and cultural studies, constituting an exploration of the cultural landscape after the heyday of postmodernism in the West and its profound influence on the Chinese cultural scene. Topics discussed include the prevalent theoretical trends and cultural phenomena in the West in the wake of postmodernism, how these developments have influenced contemporary Chinese literary and cultural criticism, and how Chinese scholars can have an equal dialogue with the dominant Western theorists. The chapters examine critical issues and figures in the fields, including postmodernity and globalization, as well as the theories of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Judith Butler. Taking a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, especially between China and the West, the title also sheds light on the imprint of Western theoretical trends on the literature and culture of contemporary China, exemplified in diasporic writing, cinema, women’s literature, popular culture, and the overall orientation of contemporary Chinese literature. The book will be a critical reference for all levels of reader interested in postmodernism, critical theory, postcolonialism, feminism, cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and contemporary Chinese literature and culture.

Bringing a fuzzy logic-based approach into translation studies and drawing on the theory of information entropy, this book discusses the translation of fuzzy language in literary works and advances a new method of measuring text fuzziness between translation and source text. Based on illustrative examples from the popular novel The Da Vinci Code and its two translated Chinese versions, the study demonstrates the fuzziness measuring method through an algorithmic process. More specifically, information entropy is applied to measure the uncertainty associated with readers’ understanding of the original and its corresponding target texts. The underlying hypothesis is that the probability distribution in which readers will understand identified fuzzy discourse is measurable. By further explicating the validity of the hypothesis, it seeks to solve translational “fuzzy” problems in the translation process and offers an alternative, novel approach to the study of “fuzzy” literary texts and their translation. Hopefully, the argument of the book that the intrinsic uncertainty of fuzzy language can be evaluated through Shannon’s information entropy will open up a new avenue to the quantitative description of the fuzziness of language and translation. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in translation studies, applied linguistics, and literary criticism.

With references to the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, this book offers a critical investigation into such epic issues as the end of art and the inherent laws of literature’s evolution, while conflating the two into one major argumentation. The book proceeds from Hegel's claim of "the end of art" to tackle the universal yet essential problem of literature: its legitimacy in a sociological sense. It invests Bourdieu’s sociological terms -- power, capital, habitus, field, etc. into the study of literature and art while taking on other theoretical enquiries, particularly the Marxist exploration into ideology, as well as aspects of economics and communication studies. This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of the sociology of literature, cultural studies, and those with specific interests in Chinese literature, literary and art theory.

Reflecting on the “clash of civilizations” as its point of departure, this book is based on a series of sixteen of the author’s interconnected, thematically focused lectures and calls for new perspectives to resist imperialistic homogeneity. Situated within a neo-humanist context, the book applies interactive cognition from an Asian perspective within which China can be perceived as an essential “other,” making it highly relevant in the quest for global solutions to the many grave issues facing humankind today. The author critiques American, European, and Chinese points of view, highlighting the significance of difference and the necessity of dialogue, before, ultimately, rethinking the nature of world literature and putting forward interactive cognition as a means of “reconciliation” between cultures. Chinese culture, as a frame of reference endowed with traditions of “harmony without homogeneity”, may help to alleviate global cultural confrontation and even reconstruct the understanding of human civilization. The book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Comparative Literature, Chinese Studies, and all those who are interested in cross-cultural communication and Chinese culture in general.

Frank O’Hara’s writing is central to any consideration of 20th century American poetry. This collection of essays, the first to be dedicated to O’Hara in nearly two decades, asks why O’Hara remains so important to 21st century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O’Hara’s distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. Frank O’Hara Now offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.

Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Something Like a Liveable Space examines the relationship between poetics and architecture in the work of the first generation New York School poets, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. Reappraising the much-debated New York School label, Mae Losasso shows how these writers constructed poetic spaces, structures, surfaces, and apertures, and sought to figure themselves and their readers in relation to these architextual sites. In doing so, Losasso reveals how the built environment shapes the poetic imagination and how, in turn, poetry alters the way we read and inhabit architectural space. Animated by archival research and architectural photographs, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School marks a decisive interdisciplinary turn in New York School studies, and offers new frameworks for thinking about postmodern American poetry in the twenty-first century.