Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: The European Hallucination
- 2 Emerson and the Language of Nature
- 3 Character Assassination: Representing Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Linguistics
- 4 Otto Jespersen and Chinese as the Future of Language
- 5 Language in Its Primary Use: Fenollosa and the Chinese Character
- Interchapter: Pound, Emerson, and the Poetics of Creative Reading
- 6 Modernizing Orientalism/Orientalizing Modernism: Ezra Pound, Chinese Translation, and English-as-Chinese
- 7 Seeing the World without Language: Gary Snyder and Chinese as American Speech
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: The European Hallucination
- 2 Emerson and the Language of Nature
- 3 Character Assassination: Representing Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Linguistics
- 4 Otto Jespersen and Chinese as the Future of Language
- 5 Language in Its Primary Use: Fenollosa and the Chinese Character
- Interchapter: Pound, Emerson, and the Poetics of Creative Reading
- 6 Modernizing Orientalism/Orientalizing Modernism: Ezra Pound, Chinese Translation, and English-as-Chinese
- 7 Seeing the World without Language: Gary Snyder and Chinese as American Speech
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
Beginning with a wide-angle lens, in an effort to accommodate so broad a subject as Western fascination with Chinese since the Renaissance, this book ultimately narrows its focus to consider the effects of that fascination on language and style in the work of some twentieth-century American poets. Primarily, I am interested in writers who are drawn to Chinese – or to a mythologized and idealized conception of it – as an embodiment of the equally mythic (and Western) idea of the language of nature, and who thus see in Chinese a model for a purified poetic practice in English, a practice consonant, as I see it, with the aims of poetic modernism generally. One could argue, of course, that such a practice properly originates with Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915) or, a decade or so earlier, with Ernest Fenollosa's essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Yet the impulses that drove Fenollosa and then Pound to Chinese, it seems clear, have deeper roots, not only in American literary history (particularly the work of Emerson) but in intellectual and linguistic traditions that go back at least as far as the Renaissance, and it is to this prehistory, with its ramifications in the fields of poetics, translation, and cultural exchange, that I also wish to draw attention.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem , pp. ix - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996