This book examines organizations of consumerist economics, which developed at the turn of the twentieth century in the West and at the turn of the twenty-first century in China, in relation to modernist poetics. Consumerist economics include the artificial “person” of the corporation, the vertical integration of production, and consumption based upon desire as well as necessity. This book assumes that poetics can be understood as a theory in practice of how a world works. Tracing the relation of economics to poetics, the book analyzes the impersonality of indirect discourse in Qian Zhongshu and James Joyce; the impressionist discourses of Mang Ke and Ezra Pound; and discursive difficulty in Mo Yan and William Faulkner. Bringing together two notably distinct cultures and traditions, this book allows us to comprehend modernism as a theory in practice of lived experience in cultures organized around consumption.
Author(s): Tiao Wang, Ronald Schleifer
Series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 273
City: Cham
Preface
Work Cited
Acknowledgments
Book Abstract
Praise for Modernist Poetics in China
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction Gai 改: Modernity as Change—Introductory Notes on Culture, Enlightenment Modernity, Western Capitalism, Complexity, Semantic Overlap, and Philological Philosophy
I. The Argument of Modernist Poetics in China
The Structure of the Argument
II. Introductory Notes on Culture, Enlightenment Modernity, Western Capitalism, Complexity, Semantic Overlap
The Complexity of Culture
Enlightenment Modernity
Western Capitalism
Complexity
Semantic Overlap
III. Modernist Poetics: Philological Philosophy
The Dialectics of Philological Philosophy
Modernism and Realism
Philology and Consumerism
The Elements of Modernist Poetics
The Argument of Modernist Poetics in China
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Shi Chang Jing Ji 市场经济: Market Economy—Modernity, Consumerist Economics, and Chinese Literature Since 1978
Institutions of Value and Features of Western Corporate Capitalism
Literary Modernism
The Economics of Enlightenment Modernity
The Modernism of Post-positivist Economics
Consumerist Economics in China
Changes in Literature
Conclusion: Modernity/Modernism
The Book as a Whole
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Xian Feng 先锋: Economies of Meaning—Semiotics, the Avant-Garde, and Consumerist Economics
The Avant-Garde of Western Corporate Capitalism
The Chinese Avant-Garde
The Avant-Garde and Semiotics
Semiotics, Economics, and the Avant-Garde
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Che Dan 扯蛋: The Bathos of High Literary Modernism—Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged and Performances of Literary Joking
The Luxurious Laughter of Modernism
The Literary “Revolution” of High Modernism
Joking Beyond Language
Che Dan 扯蛋: Bathetic Modernism
Qian’s Joking Modernism
Conclusion: The Bottomless Bathos of High Modernism
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Zhou 周: The Sublime Poetics of Literary Modernism—Luminous Detail and the Pursuit of Immanence in the Poetry of Mang Ke
Chapter Preamble
Modernism and the Performances of Emotion
The Difficulty of Imagism: Surpassing Material Nature
Consumerist Economics and the Transformation of Affect
Imagism and Affect
Chinese Imagistic Modernism
Conclusion: The Feeling of Things
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Kun Nan 困难: The Difficulty of Clan and Ethics in Literary Modernism—Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Mo Yan’s Big Breasts & Wide Hips
Consumerist Economics and the Structures of Family Life
The Difficulties of Modernism
Reading Mo Yan in the West: The Market of “Modernism”
Tactical Difficulties: Stylistic Modernism in Faulkner and Mo Yan
Ontological Difficulties: The Modernist Transformation
Conclusion: Mythic and Modernist Vision
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Afterword Fei Jian Dan 非简单: A Concluding Note—The Non-simplicities of Culture
Works Cited
Works Cited
Index
