Ideographies: Figures of Chinese writing in modern Western aesthetics

This dissertation examines the role of figurations of Chinese writing in modern Western, primarily French, aesthetics, from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. I argue that traditional Orientalism's politically and culturally negative portrait of China and its writing as static and materialist provided a set of topoi whose meaning and value were transformed by French modernism, coming to serve as an instrument of aesthetic, cultural, and political critique of the West.; The first chapter outlines the main motifs of a textual tradition that figures China as a static culture burdened by an excess of memory embodied in or imposed by its writing system. With special reference to Paul Valery's response to the Sino-Japanese War ("Le Yalou"), I argue that because "China" and "writing" had come to serve as models for each other, Europe's changing uses of "China" reflected writing's ambivalent value in European modernity. Chapter two analyzes the French japonisme of the 1860s and 70s and fin de siecle Austrian Japonismus. In the discourse of the japoniste art critics, China and Chinese art retain the negative qualities of stagnation and excessive memory, while Japan and Japanese art serve as a model for the creation of a truly modern and, paradoxically, a truly French art. The following chapter looks at the ways in which traditional notions of ideographic writing are transformed by Paul Claudel's poetics. While Claudel initially considers Chinese writing to emblematize the spiritual stagnancy of a pagan East, after his stay in Japan as ambassador during the 1920's he embraces ideographic writing, figuring the ideograph as a dynamic "engine." The final chapter focuses on Oriental writing and theatricality in Roland Barthes' "Alors la Chine?" (1975) and L'Empire des signes (1970), relating them to the use of "Oriental" theaters in the critical dramaturgies of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud and to the notion of an anti-ideological ecriture in the "Maoism" of Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of "oriental writing" for the relationship between theory and cultural studies in literary criticism.