表意文字的モダニズム Ideographic Modernism : China, Writing, Media

Bush, Christopher

Oxford University Press Inc（2010/02発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 208 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780195393828
• DDC分類 809.9335851

基本説明

New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2010. Reconstructs the modernist invention of the "ideograph" (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) in relation to such other modern forms of writing as photography, phonography, cinematography, and telegraphy.

Full Description

The ideograph is conventionally understood as a script that is ancient and Chinese; it is neither. The 'ideograph' is a modern Western invention, one contemporaneous with, and related to, such modern inventions as photography, phonography, and cinematography. Ideographic Modernism analyzes the collective significance of an array of figures of Chinese writing in Euro-American literature, showing how the ideograph becomes, in the modernist era, a prism through which to imagine the world in ethnographic and in technological terms.

Chapters on writing-as-image take up Kafka's 'An Imperial Message' and the way photography works as a model of vision without consciousness in the poetics of Imagists and their seeming opposite number, the French allegorist Paul Claudel. Chapters on writing-as-inscription, focus on Victor Segalen's Stèles (1912), a prose poem collection that formally emulates the Chinese stone monuments from which it takes its name; and on a series of generally unremarked references to Chinese writing in the work of Walter Benjamin. A final chapter considers Paul Valéry's response to the now almost forgotten Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, tracing Valéry's challenge to envision Western History had it engaged with real China, China-as-China, from the start. Overall, the study reveals the richness of the 'ideograph' as simultaneously 1) a prominent example in the imagining of China as a cultural other; 2) a way of imagining the origin, history, and possible futures of writing; and 3) a registration of the cultural effects of modern technological media.

Contents

PREFACE: IMPERIAL MEDIA/IMPERIAL MESSAGES: MODERNISM AND THE MYTH OF CHINA; INTRODUCTION: "NO BETTER INSTRUMENT": THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM; WORKS CITED