Date of Submission
Fall 2019
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Literature; Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literature
Project Advisor 1
Stephen Graham
Abstract/Artist's Statement
This project explores how trauma and violence within immigrant and refugee narratives are preserved and embodied in the poetry and prose works of four Asian American writers, Li-Young Lee, Ocean Vuong, Cathy Park Hong, and Emily Jungmin Yoon. In this examination arises the question of how trauma from a historical event can be passed down to people who have not witnessed them firsthand, such as the children of war refugees. I argue that these works are written not solely with the intention to remain truthful to the informative or factual history of these inherited traumatic events, but rather, to preserve and shed light on the emotional impact of them through structural, narrative, and poetic techniques.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Fang, Helli, ""I Refuse to Die:" The Poetics of Intergenerational Trauma in the Works of Li-Young Lee, Ocean Vuong, Cathy Park Hong, and Emily Jungmin Yoon" (2019). Senior Projects Fall 2019. 42.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2019/42
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
Included in
Literature in English, North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons