Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media

by Christopher Bush

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199889457
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Christopher Bush is Associate Professor of French and Program Director of Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher