Ideographic Modernism China, Writing, Media [Paperback]

Ideographic Modernismoffers 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.

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
Index

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 Rabat?, author ofWriting the Image After Roland Barthes

Ideographic Modernismis 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 thl£8