Winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work (2008)

Victor Segalen has come to be widely recognized in recent years as one of the luminaries of French modernism. Trained as a surgeon and Chinese interpreter, he wrote prolifically in a variety of genres. With this highly original collection of prose poems in French and Chinese, Segalen invented a new genre--the "stele-poem"--in imitation of the tall stone tablets with formal inscriptions that he saw in China. His wry persona declaims these inscriptions like an emperor...

Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Rather than focusing on the accuracy of this ideograph as a kind of representation of China (a focus that would yield predictable results), Christopher Bush reconstructs the specific history of the ideograph in order to explore the question of representation in more fundamental ways, ways that reflect the diversity and complexity of literary modernism itself.

On one level, the book makes an argument about the meaning and function of the ideograph...

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...