Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel - Hardcover

Eric Hayot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0472113402 ISBN 13: 9780472113408

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2003

Synopsis

The American poet Ezra Pound, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the writers associated with the Parisian avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel, in particular, developed passions for China. Hayot examines these writers' infatuation with China, demonstrating that Pound, Brecht, and the writers of Tel Quel looked east and found a new vision for both themselves and the West.
While Chinese Dreams focuses on specific writers' relationships with China, it also calls into question the means of representing otherness. Chinese Dreams asks if it might be possible to attend to the political meaning of imagining the other, while still enjoying the pleasures and possibilities of such dreaming.
Eric Hayot is Assistant Professor of English, the University of Arizona.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

The intricacies of the relationship between various written "Chinas"--as texts--and the nation/culture known simply as "China"--their context--are profoundly complex; Hayot's book embraces a unique form of scholarship that gives those intricacies a voice. As it traces the presence of these different "Chinas" through the work of these writers, Chinese Dreams explores the effect of the West's use of China or Chinese ideas as a way of opening up new ways of reading, writing, and thinking, and calls into question the very means of representing otherness in the history of the West. Chinese Dreams ultimately asks if it might be possible to attend to the political meaning of imagining the other, while still enjoying the pleasures and possibilities of such dreaming.

About the Author

Eric Hayot is Assistant Professor of English, University of Arizona.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0472113402
• ISBN 13: 9780472113408
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240