Fixing Landscape (eBook)

A Techno-Poetic History of China's Three Gorges

Corey Byrnes (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2019
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-54712-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Fixing Landscape reconsiders China's Three Gorges Dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Gorges region over more than two millennia, thereby offering radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China.

ByrnesCorey:

Corey Byrnes is assistant professor of modern Chinese literature at Northwestern University.Corey Byrnes is assistant professor of modern Chinese culture at Northwestern University.

---

In 1994, workers broke ground on China's Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China.Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry, paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.

Inhalt

AcknowledgmentsOrientationPassage I. DeparturePart I. A Landscape of Traces1. Tracing the Gorges2. From Trace to SitePassage II. One Thousand LiPart II. Reinscribing the Three Gorges3. Chinese Landscape4. Chinese LaborPassage III. One Thousand YearsPart III. For the Record5. A Record of the Trace6. Ink in the WoundPassage IV. Part of the MovementNotesBibliographyIndexColor Plates

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.1.2019
• Reihe/Serie: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
• Zusatzinfo: 21 color and 84 b&w illustrations
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Bauwesen
• ISBN-10: 0-231-54712-9 / 0231547129
• ISBN-13: 978-0-231-54712-3 / 9780231547123