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Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, co-edited by Sue-Im Lee and Rocio Davis (Temple UP, 2005), with an introduction by Lee, has been recognized as an Essential Academic Title by Choice Magazine. Published by the American Library Association, Choice provides reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources to librarians, faculty members and others in higher education and reaches close to 34,000 readers. Each year, the influential magazine names the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice in the previous calendar year, based on “the reviewer’s evaluation of the work, the editor’s knowledge of the field and the reviewer’s record,” according to Choice. Approximately 10 percent of works reviewed — and only about 3 percent of some 23,000 total works submitted — receive this honor.
About Literary Gestures, Choice editors noted: "This groundbreaking book is a must for any scholar of Asian American literary studies, or indeed, ethnic literature in general.... Essential" (April, 2006).
Literary Gestures contests the dominance of materialist and cultural critiques in Asian American literary discourse by re-centering critical attention around issues of aesthetics and literary form. Collapsing the perceived divisions between the "ethnic" and the "aesthetic" in Asian American literary criticism, the eleven original essays in this volume provide theoretically sophisticated and formally sensitive readings of works in prose, poetry, and drama. These contributions bring discussions of genre, canonicity, narrative, and literary value to the fore to show how aesthetic and formal concerns play an important part in the production and consumption of these works. By calling for a more balanced mode of criticism, this collection invites students and scholars to reinvest in the literary, not as a negation of the sociopolitical, but as a complementary strategy in reading and understanding Asian American literature. More on this volume is available at http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1793_reg_print.html.
Sue-Im Lee, Assistant Professor of English at Temple, teaches twentieth-century American literature, Asian American literature, and contemporary fiction. She is currently completing a monograph entitled “Presumptuous People: Reading the First Person Plural ‘We’ in Contemporary Fiction.” The book examines literary manifestations of “we” in various contemporary writers as conflicted, incomplete, and unwarranted claims of community. Lee has published essays on writers such as Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Lynne Tillman, and Karen Tei Yamashita.
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