Night of No Exile

Night of no Exile is a collection of poems preceded by a critical article entitled "‘Exile seems both a blessing and a curse': A Blissful Reading of Li-Young Lee's Poetry." That article discusses Lee's quest to achieve communication, truth, and transcendence through poetic language and concludes that he finally reaches his goal through a leap from narrative poetry to lyricism. The "exile" alluded to in the title of the article is not only geographic, but also interioran exile due to the natural limitations of all languages, and which can be bridged only in linguistic ways. Lee's solution to that problem (lyricism) turns his poetry into what Roland Barthes would call "a text of bliss," a text that manages to deeply destabilize language, while simultaneously achieving a new kind of meaning. In the main body of the manuscript, the first section contains short love lyrics. The second section, "Night of no Exile," is an attempt at the demanding genre of the longer lyric poem. The third section uses short lyrics to explore various topics, such as discovering one's identity, friendship and solidarity between women, family history, and childhood memories. Finally, the last section includes poems, four of them longer, attempting to combine narrative and lyric impulses in a way not unlike Li-Young Lee's experimentation with those two genres.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of North Texas

Year dc:date

1999

Author dc:creator

• Jones, Marie C.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bond, Bruce
• Hummell, Austin
• Raign, Kathryn

• Lee, Li-Young, 1957- -- Criticism and interpretation.
• poetry
• poetics
• Li-Young Lee

Statement dc:rights

• Public
• Copyright
• Jones, Marie C.
• Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

oclc: 45003466
untcat: b2226119
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2217/
ark: ark:/67531/metadc2217

OAI identifier oai:identifier

info:ark/67531/metadc2217