Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics (Thinking Literature)

Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning. &nbsp; In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. "Chinese Whispers" refers to an American children's game dating to the years of the Cold War, a period in which everything Chinese, or even Chinese sounding, was suspect. Taking up various manifestations of the phrase in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Huang investigates how poetry, always to a significant degree untranslatable, complicates the transpacific production of meanings and values. The book opens with the efforts of I. A. Richards, arguably the founder of Anglo-American academic literary criticism, to promote Basic English in China in the early twentieth century. It culminates by resituating Ernest Fenollosa's famous essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," exploring the ways in which Chinese has historically enriched but also entrapped the Western conception of language. &nbsp;

Literature & Fiction

Huang, Professor Yunte

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

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Books by Huang, Professor Yunte

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Huang, Professor Yunte. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics (Thinking Literature)