This paper problematizes Westcentrism still remaining in the recent push toward a seemingly de-Westernized globalization of literary studies and world literature in the American academia by introducing the representative second-generation Nigerian poet, Niyi Osundare (1947- ) who proposes the de-colonizing, “alter-native” theory of poetry. Osundare, who appears on a vague, abstract stage of third edition of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, has developed the “alter-native” theory of poetry in the concrete historical context of Nigeria from the British colonialism beginning In the early 19th century, through its official independence in 1960, to its aftermath including military dictatorship and neo-colonialism. He defines poetry as the “song of the marketplace,” accessible to the people, denouncing the “difficult poems” of Western modernist poets and the first-generation Nigerian poets who followed them. In referring to the “poet” or “the writer as righter” and even “warrior” as one who believes that poetry can change the world for the oppressed, Osundare criticizes the contemporary Western notion of “the death of the author” as well as the first-generation Nigerian poets who did not believe in the revolutionary function of poetry. Furthermore, he recommends the maintenance of ethnic languages against the “conquering” English and the tentative stay in a “bilingual situation” until Nigerian writers find ways to communicate through their ethnic languages, refusing the idea of English as the only possible communicative or literary language, a position which he terms “Caliban syndrome” and “Achebe syndrome.” Osundare, recognizing the universality of this type of “alter-native” literature or literary theory, particularly in post- or neo-colonial countries, argues for the possibility of a new world literature through cross-national solidarity with the oppressed.

Many of Emily Dickinson's works are based on the femininity demanded by the patriarchal society of her time. However, the female speakers in her work react to the suppression of this dominant ideology in two opposite ways of conformity and negation. While critics including Vivian Pollak and B.A. Clarke Mossberg attributed these responses to external factors such as patriarchal family relationship, religion or social culture, James Dickey argued that such approach was excessively focused on such factors, and thus neglected the literary analysis of Dickinson's works and the female speakers within. Therefore, this study aims to observe the conflicts experienced by Dickinson originating from the gender roles imposed by the patriarchal society of her times by analyzing in detail the feminine image and the voice of the female speaker in her works. And based on this, it will prove that the opposite reactions of the female speaker stem from the dialectic process of self-denial and establishment of Dickinson's ego originating from exploration of her unique identity.

This paper analyzes Cathy Park Hong's “Ballad of Our Jim” which is the first part of her third book Engine Empire, and explores how she rewrites the myth of the American West or the westward expansion propelled in the name of Manifest Destiny. By analyzing the poems which follow the path of outlaw white brothers or fortune-seekers travelling to California during the Civil War and their kidnapped half-Comanche Jim, the study shows that the poet attempts to reveal the violence and racism inherent in the Western myth and suggest the potentiality of racial hybridity represented by Jim.
The poems in “Ballad of Our Jim” not only present pillage and violence by the outlaw gangsters and Jim adapted as their tool, but also reveal discrimination which victimizes racial others such as native Americans and the Chinese. Jim's Comanche mother is banished by her “Injun killing” husband for a white woman, and a “Chinaman gets knifed for being what he is.” The white brothers suggest to eradicate racial others to build “the clear world” in the west.
By contrast, “Our Jim,” the only survivor of the gang, is presented as a potent symbol of racial hybridity holding the indigenous element that cannot be assimilated by the dominant colonial forces, even though his fate is uncertain “in the denuded earth.”

For Williams, poetry does not represent daily experience but the poet's 'consciousness of immediate contact with the world.' One can contact things beyond the barrier of conventions such as conceptual knowledge, logic, and story, by means of sympathy as a function of imagination. It enables the poet to detect their peculiarities, and thereby his consciousness is enlarged and participates in the universal process of nature. This is why particular things are the only source of universal experience.
The peculiarities of things can be expressed only through the tangible features of language, which dominate Williams' poetry. The other function of imagination, 'design' organizes words so as to keep them from being subordinate to syntax and logic that blurs their particularity and tangibility. It also represents the movement of the consciousness, the sympathetic pulses the poet feels 'in the condition of imaginative suspension.' His representation therefore becomes materialization, and his poetry an object tangible and dynamic, which is an extension of nature.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) conceives a poem as a web of relationships, in which all the elements of the poem are to be understood, not in isolation from one another, but rather as part of a rhythmic pattern that weave them all together as a whole. Rukeyser has found poetic expression to describe nature that the science of her day in 1930s was seeking to explore and explain. Her notion of poetry as “a system” betrays similar concerns and assumptions of General Systems Theory, proposed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), which emphasizes the essential interrelatedness and interconnectedness of all phenomena, be they physical, biological, and social. This paper examines some of Rukeyser's poems and her relational poetics, to explore how her view of poetry as a system reflects the General Systems Theory, focusing on her poetic understanding of science and the scientific implications of her relational poetics. The paper will also make an investigation into the way Rukeyser, while greatly influenced by the nineteenth century scientist Willard Gibbs, has translated him rather creatively to fit into her relational poetics, in a way which is deeply resonant with the systems theory.