A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics)

Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions-East and West, local and global, common and strange-that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? In A Common Strangeness , Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flâneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms This book begins with two questions: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? Insofar as it responds to these questions, the book is a history of the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that have shaped the aesthetics of globalization from the late-Cold War period to today. But the book is also a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular. It explores what it is possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual. Instead of dichotomies, it offers a triangulated, multilingual, comparative approach to literary studies. Moving among avant-garde poetic examples from China, Russia, and the United States, it traces a series of cross-cultural encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, A Common Strangeness tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms "Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions-East and West, local and global, common and strange-that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? In A Common Strangeness, Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flaneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms."--Project Muse Contents 7 Illustrations 9 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction 17 CHAPTER ONE Yang Lian and the Flâneur in Exile 31 CHAPTER TWO Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Poetic Correspondences 60 CHAPTER THREE Lyn Hejinian and Russian Estrangement 88 CHAPTER FOUR Bei Dao and World Literature 111 CHAPTER FIVE Dmitri Prigov and Cross-Cultural Conceptualism 141 CHAPTER SIX Charles Bernstein and Broken English 180 Conclusion 209 Notes 215 Works Cited 251 Index 281 Tracing Fordham Law School's history in the context of developments in legal education over the course of the 20th century, this book pinpoints those factors that produce greatness in a law school and those that contribute to its decline. Kaczorowski traces how the Law School, with the unprecedented financial support and active involvement of its alumni, is resuming its prior position as one of America's leading law schools Yang Lian And The Flâneur In Exile -- Arkadii Dragomoshchenko And Poetic Correspondences -- Lyn Hejinian And Russian Estrangement -- Bei Dao And World Literature -- Dmitri Prigov And Cross-cultural Conceptualism -- Charles Bernstein And Broken English. Jacob Edmond. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [235]-264) And Index. Examines poetic responses to the transition from the late Cold War period to the post-Cold War era of globalization, focusing on the work of Bei Dao and Yang Lian from China, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Dmitrii Prigov from Russia, and Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian from the United States.