Avant-garde Orientalism

Zusatztext

<div><p>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, <i>Avant-garde Orientalism </i>works in the best tradition of comparative literary study to identify and analyze a distinct category of world literature. <i> </i></p></div>

Autorenportrait

David LeHardy Sweet is the author of Savage Sight/Constructed Noise: Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-gardes and the translator of Jean Baudrillard¿s The Divine Left. He received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and has taught literature at various universities in New York, Chicago, Paris, and Cairo. He now lives in New York.

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