| "Chinese Dreams" is about what happens when the West represents China. While popular images of China in western culture date back as far as the publication of Marco Polo's memoirs in the early fourteenth century, China has also exercised a profound influence on the twentieth-century avant-garde and its politics, literature, and cultural theory, most often functioning as a lever that throws the West from its foundations. As such, it seems to fall under the rubric of an Orientalism which, as Edward Said describes it, "is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world" (12).;Chapter one, on Pound, opens the dissertation with the strange fact of Pound's 1915 translations of Chinese poetry in Cathay. History's judgment that Pound, despite knowing no Chinese, translated the poems better than anyone else ever has, sets the stage for a series of important questions about how Westerners come to "know" China, and how much of that knowledge is simply the ghostly reflection of their own desires.;My look at Brecht in chapter two carries those questions into the realm of theater via an extended look at Brecht's famous essay, "Alienation-effects in Chinese acting." Unlike Pound, who seemed happiest when truly getting down to the genuine Chineseness of things, Brecht wishes to rid the Chinese alienation-effect of its original Chineseness, and make it fully his own. But can you have "Chinese" acting Without China? Or is a measure of its Chinese "strangeness" always left behind in the experience, like a taste in the mouth?;Chapter three, finally, turns to the telquelians---Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Marcelin Pleynet---for whom China became the name of both the "revolution in action" and the "revolution in language" that they believed in. Returned from Beijing, the telquelians not only outgrew but eventually repudiated their Chinese interest; their charged Writings on China run through a wild, wide gauntlet of emotions, culminating most intoxicatingly in Julia Kristeva's fierce nostalgia for the lost opportunities of Tel Quel's revolution. |
