Assistant Profesor of English Steven Yao delivered a paper, "A Rim with a View: Orientalism, Geography and the Historiography of Modernism," at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Chicago, in November. In the paper Yao surveys approaches to Asian cultures and traditions in the criticism of Modernist literature and tries to offer a new strategy for addressing the complex interactions between East and West in the both the constitution and dissemination of Modernism as an artistic movement in different locations around the world.
Also during November he delivered a paper titled "Ezra Pound, Cathay and the Prehistory of Chinese American Poetry" at the Transpacific Modernisms: Critical Problems and Perspectives Conference held at Princeton University. In this paper, he argues for the crucial importance of Ezra Pound's famous collection of translated Chinese poetry as a necessary foundation for understanding the broader critical and political significance within the context of canonical American literature of subsequent poetry produced by Chinese American writers. In this paper, he traced the particular thematic, rhetorical and formal terms that Pound set forth for articulating the category of "Chinese-ness in poetry in English.
