Chinese whispers toward a transpacific poetics / Yunte Huang.
| Author/creator | Huang, Yunte |
| Format | Electronic |
| Publication Info | Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. |
| Description | 176 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Supplemental Content | Full text available from eBooks on EBSCOhost |
| Subjects |
| Series | Thinking literature Thinking literature. ^A1418211 |
| Contents | Introduction Serve the People, Read Them Verse: A Transpacific Journey in Poetics and Politics -- Through the Looking Glass: Basic English, Chinglish, and Translocal Dialect -- Listening to Marco Polo: Sound, Money, and Vernacular Imagination -- Words Made in China: Ezra Pound as a Translational Poet -- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Too Big to Fail: Wallace Stevens, John Cage, and the Poetics of Risk -- Chinese Whispers: The Future of Meaning in the Age of Information -- Coda: The Story of Mr. Shi Eating Lions. |
| Abstract | "The noted critic and translator Yunte Huang is known for his work on the cultural and linguistic transactions between the Anglo-American and Chinese worlds. In this new book, he explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. The title of the book, 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, but also evokes Europeans' inability to understand China in earlier centuries. Taking up various manifestations of "Chinese Whispers" 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. For Huang, Basic English foreshadows the rise of the digital technology, making for a dry run of the search for universal intelligibility. It culminates by resituating Ernest Fenollosa's famous essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," in the context of what Lev Manovich has called "the language of the new media," exploring the ways in which Chinese has historically enriched but also entrapped the Western conception of language. Chinese Whispers is an important contribution to comparative literary study and transnational poetics"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Access restriction | Available only to authorized users. |
| Technical details | Mode of access: World Wide Web |
| Genre/form | Electronic books. |
| LCCN | 2022009701 |
| ISBN | 9780226822648 (cloth) |
| ISBN | 9780226822655 (paperback) |
| ISBN | (ebook) |
Availability
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electronic Resources | Access Content Online | ✔ Available |