Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel

by Eric Hayot

The American poet Ezra Pound, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the writers associated with the Parisian avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel, in particular, developed passions for China. 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.

While Chinese Dreams focuses on specific writers' relationships with China, it also calls into question the means of representing otherness. Chinese Dreams 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, the University of Arizona.

Genres: China

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Eric Hayot is professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Elements of Academic Style (Columbia, 2014), On Literary Worlds (2012), and The Hypothetical Mandarin (2009).

Reviews

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

China as an epistemology, to me, sounds very Buddhist. Well, it's quite a bit different. But, in Buddhism, the dominating question has always been what it does instead of what it is. Hence, if we understand epistemology as an act of knowing instead of a way of knowing, then China as epistemology is what it does and how it does things to us (whatever this us is). the dilemma of representation, in Buddhist terms, is the dilemma of knowing and acting because to know is to act.
Anyway, I should have read this book for my Translation seminar. Pound is so out of there, and this book does a good job in explaining why and why not.

Actually, xi xia wen looks like tianshu.