ABSTRACT

Global modernisms are marked by tremendous transformations in lifestyle, historical consciousness, cultural values, ethics, wars, and crises. This book emphasizes modernist connections within literature, culture, history, and media beyond the nation state and the bifurcation between East and West. Instead of deconstructing and separating, Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe composes and forges new combinations, linkages, and translations that place Chinese and European modernisms on an equal footing. This book features contributions on James Joyce, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anna Seghers, Qian Zhongshu, Weimar labor modernism, Chinese wartime literature, Chinese movies in divided Germany, and Sinophone modernity among other subjects.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

Latour’s Compositionism and Global Modernism

part I|60 pages

Chinese-German Literary Connections

chapter 1|21 pages

Luo Binji’s Spring in Beiwang Garden

Wartime Cultural Discourse and the Mode of Irony in Chinese Narratives of the 1940s 1

chapter 3|20 pages

Internationalist Montages

World-Making in Interwar Germany’s Labor Movement Literature

part II|50 pages

European Connections

chapter 4|24 pages

The Lures of Polyphony

Socrates, Joyce, Schoenberg

chapter 5|23 pages

Hedging the Particular, Hedging the Universal

Structural “Europes” in Literary Modernism (1890–1917)

part III|48 pages

Filmic and Sinophone Connections

chapter 6|21 pages

Raising the “Bamboo Curtain”

Chinese Films in Divided Germany

chapter 7|26 pages

Sinophone Modernity

History, Culture, Geopolitics