Book Description
The American poet Ezra Pound, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the writers associated with the Parisian avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel, in particular, developed passions for China. Hayot examines these writers' infatuation with China, demonstrating that Pound, Brecht, and the writers of Tel Quel looked east and found a new vision for both themselves and the West.
While Chinese Dreams focuses on specific writers' relationships with China, it also calls into question the means of representing otherness. Chinese Dreams asks if it might be possible to attend to the political meaning of imagining the other, while still enjoying the pleasures and possibilities of such dreaming.
Eric Hayot is Assistant Professor of English, the University of Arizona.


From the Inside Flap
The intricacies of the relationship between various written "Chinas"--as texts--and the nation/culture known simply as "China"--their context--are profoundly complex; Hayot's book embraces a unique form of scholarship that gives those intricacies a voice. As it traces the presence of these different "Chinas" through the work of these writers, Chinese Dreams explores the effect of the West's use of China or Chinese ideas as a way of opening up new ways of reading, writing, and thinking, and calls into question the very means of representing otherness in the history of the West. Chinese Dreams ultimately asks if it might be possible to attend to the political meaning of imagining the other, while still enjoying the pleasures and possibilities of such dreaming.

FROM THE PUBLISHER