Seeing Through Abstraction | Literary Encounters with Information in Modern China

Anatoly Detwyler

ISBN 10: 0231219881 / ISBN 13: 9780231219884

Published by Columbia University Press, 2025

About this Item

Seeing Through Abstraction | Literary Encounters with Information in Modern China | Anatoly Detwyler | Taschenbuch | Einband - flex.(Paperback) | Englisch | 2025 | Columbia University Press | EAN 9780231219884 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu.

Seller Inventory # 134004075

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Seeing Through Abstraction | Literary Encounters with Information in Modern China
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231219881
• ISBN 13: 9780231219884
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 151W x 229H x 17D millimeters 151 millimeters width by 229 millimeters height by 17 millimeters depth
• Weight: 392 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Bücher

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.