Ideographic Modernism

Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Through analyses of works by Claudel Pound Kafka Benjamin Segalen and Valery among others Christopher Bush traces the interweaving of Western modernity''s ethnographic and technological imaginaries in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed Chinese forms even as traditional representations of the Orient lived on in modernist-era responses to media. The book also makes a methodological argument demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism.