Ideographic Modernism

Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-539382-8
Verlag: ACADEMIC

Buch, Englisch, 208 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 454 g

The ideograph is conventionally understood as a script that is ancient and Chinese; it is neither. The 'ideograph' is a modern Western invention, one contemporaneous with, and related to, such modern inventions as photography, phonography, and cinematography. Ideographic Modernism analyzes the collective significance of an array of figures of Chinese writing in Euro-American literature, showing how the ideograph becomes, in the modernist era, a prism through which to imagine the world in ethnographic and in technological terms.

Chapters on writing-as-image take up Kafka's 'An Imperial Message' and the way photography works as a model of vision without consciousness in the poetics of Imagists and their seeming opposite number, the French allegorist Paul Claudel. Chapters on writing-as-inscription, focus on Victor Segalen's Stèles (1912), a prose poem collection that formally emulates the Chinese stone monuments from which it takes its name; and on a series of generally unremarked references to Chinese writing in the work of Walter Benjamin. A final chapter considers Paul Valéry's response to the now almost forgotten Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, tracing Valéry's challenge to envision Western History had it engaged with real China, China-as-China, from the start. Overall, the study reveals the richness of the 'ideograph' as simultaneously 1) a prominent example in the imagining of China as a cultural other; 2) a way of imagining the origin, history, and possible futures of writing; and 3) a registration of the cultural effects of modern technological media.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bush

Bush, Christopher

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 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 ChinaL

- 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

Über Autor(innen)

Bush is Assistant Professor of French at Northwestern University.