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Ritratto d’artista con fori d’uscita: Night Sky with Exit Wounds di Ocean Vuong
This essay focuses on the poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016), published by the Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong, and endeavors to challenge previous readings of Vuong’s oeuvre that centered on his exceptional life, overlooking the formal quality of his poetry in favor of a reductionist and biographically focused reading, informed by essentializing notions of identity and a crystallized idea of what ethnic literature should be. By offering close readings of the poems “Threshold”, “Telemachus”, “Trojan”, “Odysseus Redux”, “Logophobia”, and “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” through the lenses of Memory Studies and Asian American critique, it attempts to show how Vuong adapts the idea of myth and employs postmodern textual strategies in order to deconstruct current notions of ethnic autobiography and rebuild his own version, which explicitly addresses issues of epistemic violence, the ventriloquizing and appropriation of the Other, and the relationship between author and ethnic community.
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