Minor Feelings and Minor Aesthetics in Asian American Literature

Abstract

This thesis surveys the aesthetics mobilized by Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life and Where Reasons End as well as Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay to accommodate and navigate the negative, non-cathartic, and untelegenic feelings that arise in Asian American and diasporic realities. This thesis adopts the theoretical framework of minor literature, minor feelings, and minor aesthetics, which prefigures a formal-affective-aesthetic approach. Pertaining to the specificities of Asian American and Asian diasporic affectivity, this thesis focuses on unfeeling as an example of minor feeling and examines the aesthetics of flatness and inscrutability. Li’s two works and Wang’s work are chosen for they exhibit different ways of representing and negotiating affective flatness and inscrutability. With two main body chapters respectively devoted to Li’s writing and Wang’s writing, this thesis theorizes the critical productivity, aesthetic sensibility, and political potential of unfeeling and inscrutability. With regard to the general field of Asian American literary studies, this thesis contributes to the pertinent questions of how to read superficiality and inscrutability as well as how to theorize negativity and ambivalence.