Seeing Through Abstraction

Literary Encounters with Information in Modern China
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-231-21988-4
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 229 mm x 151 mm, Gewicht: 400 g

During the first half of the twentieth century, China saw sweeping changes in the material conditions and practices of communication, transforming the volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value of information. Encountering the new abstract matter of information, a generation of Chinese writers faced a crisis of literary identity: What made literature distinct from other informational genres, such as newspaper columns, financial figures, and telegrams? How was the emergent information order reshaping individual and social knowledge? And where would literature stand within this new order?

This book examines how writers of the Republican era (1912–1949) came to recognize and respond to “information.” Anatoly Detwyler investigates a wide range of literary and graphic experiments that engaged with different forms of information management, including data visualization, financial statistics, and propaganda science. These works, he argues, collectively attest to a new perceptibility of abstraction and its epistemological implications for apprehending reality. Tracing this mode of perception across fiction, poetry, and woodcut art, Seeing Through Abstraction offers a revisionist account of the development of modern Chinese literature and repositions it within the global history of the information age.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Detwyler, Anatoly

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Daten / Datenbanken Informationstheorie, Kodierungstheorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Ost- & Südostasiatische Literatur
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Forschung und Information Informationstheorie, Kodierungstheorie

Über Autor(innen)

Anatoly Detwyler is an assistant professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a coeditor of Information: A Reader and Literary Information in China: A History, both published by Columbia University Press in 2021.