Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel by Eric Hayot


Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel
Title : Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0472113402
ISBN-10 : 9780472113408
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 240
Publication : First published January 1, 2003

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.


Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel Reviews


  • Jessica Zu

    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.