This timely book explores how Buddhist-inflected thought has enriched contemporary American literature. Continuing the work begun in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, editors John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff and the volume’s contributors turn to the most recent developments, revealing how mid-1970s through early twenty-first-century literature has employed Buddhist texts, principles, and genres. Just as Buddhism underwent indigenization when it moved from India to Tibet, to China, and to Japan, it is now undergoing that process in the United States. While some will find literary creativity in this process, others lament a loss of authenticity. The book begins with a look at the American reception of Zen and at the approaches to Dharma developed by African Americans. The work of consciously Buddhist and Buddhist-influenced writers such as Don De Lillo, Gary Snyder, and Jackson Mac Low is analyzed, and a final section of the volume contains interviews and discussions with contemporary Buddhist writers. These include an interview with Gary Snyder; a discussion with Maxine Hong Kingston and Charles Johnson; and discussions of competing American and Asian values at the Beat- and Buddhist-inspired writing program at Naropa University with poets Joanne Kyger, Reed Bye, Keith Abbott, Andrew Schelling, and Elizabeth Robinson.
Tabla de materias
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Jan Willis
Introduction
John Whalen-Bridge & Gary Storhoff
PART I. Widening the Stream: Literature as Transmission
1. The Transmission of Zen as Dual Discourse: Shaku Soen and Okakura Kakuzo
Jane Falk
2. Black American Buddhism: History and Representation
Linda Furgerson Selzer
PART II. The New Lamp: Buddhism and Contemporary Writers
3. Some of the Dharma: The Human, the Heavenly, and the “Real Work” in the Writings of Gary Snyder
Allan Johnston
4. “Listen and Relate”: Buddhism, Daoism, and Chance in the Poetry and Poetics of Jackson Mac Low
Jonathan Stalling
5. A Deeper Kind of Truth: Buddhist Themes in Don De Lillo’s
Libra
Gary Storhoff
PART III. Speaking as Enlightenment: Interviews with Buddhist Writers
6. “The Present Moment Happening”: A Conversation with Gary Snyder about
Danger on Peaks
Julia Martin
7. Embodied Mindfulness: Charles Johnson and Maxine Hong Kingston on Buddhism, Race, and Beauty
John Whalen-Bridge
8. Poetry and Practice at Naropa University
John Whalen-Bridge
List of Contributors
Index
Sobre el autor
John Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. His books include
Norman Mailer’s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest.
Gary Storhoff is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Stamford. He is the author of
Understanding Charles Johnson. Together they are coeditors of
The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature and
American Buddhism as a Way of Life, both also published by SUNY Press.