Hardback : £25.84
Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valery, among others, Christopher Bush traces the interweaving of Western modernity's ethnographic and technological imaginaries, in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed "Chinese" forms, even as traditional representations of "the Orient" lived on in modernist-era responses to media. The book also makes a methodological argument, demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism.
Christopher Bush is Associate Professor of French and Program Director of Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.
Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valery, among others, Christopher Bush traces the interweaving of Western modernity's ethnographic and technological imaginaries, in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed "Chinese" forms, even as traditional representations of "the Orient" lived on in modernist-era responses to media. The book also makes a methodological argument, demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism.
Christopher Bush is Associate Professor of French and Program Director of Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.
Preface: Imperial Media/Imperial Messages: Modernism and the Myth
of China
Introduction: "no better instrument": The Chinese Written Character
as a Medium
1. "visible nature": Image, Photography, and the Apparition of
China
2. "simply the form": Inscription, Phonography, and the Chinese
Scene of Writing
3. "to imitate the Chinese": Mimesis, Cinema, and Mechanical
Reproduction
4. "shocks in China": Space, Telegraphy, and the Age of the World
Picture
Works Cited
Index
Christopher Bush is Associate Professor of French and Program Director of Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.
"Taking his cue from Gertrude Stein's quip ('In China there is no
need of China because in China china is china'), this remarkable
book makes us understand why modernism (and also theory) always
need China as 'China'--not the projection of an Orientalist
discourse, but a trope of otherness as writing. Bush probes with
unrivaled depth and subtlety the paradoxes created by a Chinese
'arche-writing' seen as an active exoticism at the core of two
centuries of
creative mistranslations." --Jean-Michel Rabaté, author of Writing
the Image After Roland Barthes
"Ideographic Modernism is a brilliantly learned and perceptive
book, one that makes an original and significant contribution to
the still evolving series of studies that have dealt with literary
modernism and Orientalism in the wake of post-structuralism."
--Robert Kern, author of Orientalism, Modernism, and the American
Poem
"Provide[s] insightful, conceptually sophisticated analyses and
reflections...Its thoroughly argued, self-reflexive, and
multi-layered account of how modernist writers wrote and thought
about, by way of, and with China constitutes at the same time a
compelling invitation to rethink what reference as such, what
writing about something means." --Modern Chinese Literature and
Culture
"Bracing and insightful...a remarkable accomplishment."
--Comparative Literature Studies
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