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Full Description
Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning.
In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. "Chinese whispers" refers to an American children's game dating to the years of the Cold War, a period in which everything Chinese, or even Chinese sounding, was suspect. Taking up various manifestations of the phrase in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Huang investigates how poetry, always to a significant degree untranslatable, complicates the transpacific production of meanings and values.
The book opens with the efforts of I. A. Richards, arguably the founder of Anglo-American academic literary criticism, to promote Basic English in China in the early twentieth century. It culminates by resituating Ernest Fenollosa's famous essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," exploring the ways in which Chinese has historically enriched but also entrapped the Western conception of language.
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction. Serve the People, Read Them Verse: A Transpacific Journey in Poetics and Politics
1. Through the Looking Glass: Basic English, Chinglish, and Translocal Dialect
2. Listening to Marco Polo: Sound, Money, and Vernacular Imagination
3. Words Made in China: Ezra Pound as a Translational Poet
4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Too Big to Fail: Wallace Stevens, John Cage, and the Poetics of Risk
5. Chinese Whispers: The Future of Meaning in the Age of Information
Coda: The Story of Mr. Shi Eating Lions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
