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Avant-garde Orientalism : the eastern 'other' in twentieth-century travel narrative and poetry / David LeHardy Sweet

Author
Sweet, David LeHardy, 1961-
Published
[Cham, Switzerland] : Palgrave Macmillan, [2017]
Copyright Date
©2017
Physical Description
xiii, 318 pages ; 22 cm

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Contents
Machine generated contents note: 1.Introduction -- Avant-garde Offensive -- Avant-garde Orientalism, or a Visionary Exoticism -- Discontinuous Itineraries -- 2.The Poetics of Travel, Postcolonial Criticism, and the Theory of the Avant-garde -- Travel Theory's Assimilation of Postcolonial Method: MacCannell, Said -- The Derridean Inflection and the Emergence of the Hybrid: Spivak, Bhabha -- Global Ideoscapes, Postmodern Tourists, and Postmillennial Reconsiderations: Appadurai, Kaplan, Almond -- Theorists of the Avant-garde: Poggioli, Burger, Horkheimer, and Adorno -- 3.A Literary Genealogy of Avant-garde Orientalism -- Romanticist Origins of Avant-garde Orientalism -- Mann's Venice as Fatal Gateway to the East -- Kafka's French Algerian Penal Colony -- Arbitrary Arbiters and Itinerant Marginals in Genet and Duras -- From Avant-garde Affront to Postmodern Indifference: Geoff Dyer's East/West Split -- 4.The Maghreb and Tangier -- A Hermeneutics of Aggression and Reciprocity -- From Pastoral to Horror: Gide and Bowles in the Maghreb -- "Innaresting Sexual Arrangement": William Burroughs Takes Tangier -- 5.Egypt and Palestine -- Fecundity of the Dead: Cocteau Meets the Pharaohs -- Muscular Impotence: Marinetti's Futurist Egypt -- Durrell's Alexandria -- Pyuchou's Baedeker Farce and the Automata of Empire -- A Bengali Indian in Egypt: Amitav Ghosh's Medieval Alternative -- The Songs of the Fedayeen: Saint Genet Among the Lions -- 6.India -- Disembodied India: Frederic Prokosch's' The Asiatics -- Barbarian Sightings: 'Die Lacanian Subject of Henri Michaux -- A Labyrinth of Multitudes: Octavio Paz's Embassy to the Out castes -- The Beats in the Jungle: Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Snyder, and Kyger -- 7.Conclusion: The Far East -- Segalen, Michaux, and Barthes: From Diversity to "The Clangor of Japanese Instruments" -- World Literature and Simultaneous Contrasts.
Summary
This study explores the work of Western avant-garde writers who traveled to and wrote about Asia and North Africa. Though exoticist in outlook, many of these writers were also anti-colonialist and thus avoided some of the pitfalls of academic orientalism by assuming an aesthetics of diversity while employing strategies of provocation and reciprocity. As a survey of works on travel (including essays, novels, poems, and plays), the book challenges or modifies many postcolonial assumptions about Western writers on the Orient: from the French Surrealists to the American Beats and even transnational authors of the new millennium. Through a synthesis of avant-garde, postcolonial, and travel literature theories, 'Avant-garde orientalism' works in the best tradition of comparative literary study to identify and analyze a distinct category of world literature.
Subject(s)
ISBN
3319503723
9783319503721
9783319503738
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-297) and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 20513827