6 x 9. 240 pgs. (2003) Cloth 978-0-472-11340-8 $70.00S  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Look Inside Subjects Asian Studies / Literary Studies--Asian Literature / Literary Studies--Poetry and Poetry Criticism / Theater and Performance

Chinese Dreams
Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel

Eric Hayot



Explores China's profound impact on the twentieth-century avant-garde

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About the Book

Popular images of China in Western culture date back as far as the publication of Marco Polo's memoirs in the early fourteenth century. But China exercised a particularly profound influence on the avant-garde in the twentieth century. The American poet Ezra Pound, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the writers associated with the Parisian avant-garde literary journal Tel quel developed especially strong passions for China. Eric 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.

China touched both Pound's poetry and Brecht's theater, and led Telquelian Julia Kristeva to write, looking back on her 1974 trip to China, that the world is "made up of incommensurable isolations." 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.

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