{"title":"Leftover liquids and the moisture of mourning: the oozes of Ocean Vuong’s oeuvre","authors":"Minh Huynh Vu","doi":"10.1093/english/efad029","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article tracks the moisture that spills across Ocean Vuong’s poetry and prose. Whereas the oceanic serves as the spectacular site across which Vietnamese refugees are rescued and rehabilitated through the scripts of US humanitarianism, moisture – as an ambient material and process – coagulates a queer, minor mode of refugee mourning and melancholia in the ongoing aftermath of the War in Vietnam. Pooling together these leftover liquids – sweat, mud, blood, amniotic fluid, semen, and urine – this study considers how the literary and chemical properties of humidity can alter extant epistemic configurations of war: not as an exceptional event, but instead as an everyday surround that continues to be weathered.","PeriodicalId":42863,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ENGLISH","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efad029","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article tracks the moisture that spills across Ocean Vuong’s poetry and prose. Whereas the oceanic serves as the spectacular site across which Vietnamese refugees are rescued and rehabilitated through the scripts of US humanitarianism, moisture – as an ambient material and process – coagulates a queer, minor mode of refugee mourning and melancholia in the ongoing aftermath of the War in Vietnam. Pooling together these leftover liquids – sweat, mud, blood, amniotic fluid, semen, and urine – this study considers how the literary and chemical properties of humidity can alter extant epistemic configurations of war: not as an exceptional event, but instead as an everyday surround that continues to be weathered.
期刊介绍：
English is an internationally known journal of literary criticism, published on behalf of The English Association. Each issue contains essays on major works of English literature or on topics of general literary interest, aimed at readers within universities and colleges and presented in a lively and engaging style. There is a substantial review section, in which reviewers have space to situate a book within the context of recent developments in its field, and present a detailed argument. English is unusual among academic journals in publishing original poetry. This policy embodies the view that the critical and creative functions, often so widely separated in the teaching of English, can co-exist and cross-fertilise each other.
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