{"id":2062,"date":"2013-07-09T09:30:22","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T01:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2062"},"modified":"2013-07-04T01:33:26","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T17:33:26","slug":"two-reviews-of-jacob-edmonds-a-common-strangeness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2062","title":{"rendered":"Three Reviews of Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

Three new reviews of Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness<\/a><\/em> have appeared. Brian Reed’s “Chances of Rhyme<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

The words transnational and globalization appear frequently within scholarship on contemporary poetry, but so far there have been few sustained attempts to narrate recent developments across more than two language-groups or geographical regions. … In the present era of pervasive budget cuts, curtailed language instruction, and increased productivity demands, who has the training, time, and resources required to engage in even more broad-based comparative research?<\/p>\n

At least one person can now be said to fill the bill. Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature<\/em> recounts the history of avant-garde poetry from the late 1960s to the turn of the millennium in the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet Union\/Russian Federation. Edmond concentrates on six figures: Yang Lian and Bei Dao, menglong shiren<\/em> (Misty Poets) who defied Cultural Revolution-era restrictions on writerly freedom; Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Dmitri Prigov, samizdat poets whose careers extend into the post-Soviet period; and Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein, founding members of the avant-garde movement known as Language poetry. Throughout, Edmond shows himself to be thoroughly grounded in the relevant literary traditions, and whether a given poem is written in English, Russian, or Mandarin, he proves able to supply the kind of intensive, patient, erudite textual analysis that one associates with the Yale school back in its heyday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Lisa Samuels’s “Bridges Across Silos<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

\n
Jacob Edmond\u2019s refreshing book focuses on concerns common to avant-garde poetry and comparative literature, specifically poetic material produced primarily in the 1980s and 1990s by six writers from China, Russia, and the United States and comparative literature\u2019s interest in negotiating dialectics between self and other. Edmond\u2019s introduction indicates his interest in sighting a \u2018third alternative\u2019 to Maurice Blanchot\u2019s 1971 concept of \u2018common strangeness\u2019: Edmond wants to write within zones \u2018between the common and the co-man, between speaking of<\/em> others\u2014of exile literature, modernism, or world literature\u2014and speaking to<\/em> them: responding to how we can know or write about each other in the first place.\u2019 … The book stays true to the dialectical energy promised in its introduction. That energy shifts its sails in relevant directions, and it consistently concerns matters both brought forward and presumed as background to this work.<\/div>\n
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And Cosima Bruno<\/a>:<\/div>\n
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\n
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While many comparative literary studies have used textual and contextual analysis to examine authors and literary movements so as to show commonalities and differences, Edmond employs a different methodology. The domestic political and literary contexts, although a constant presence in the background, are only lightly sketched, and focus is directed on the concerns that have shaped the work of these authors in the world, as members of a transnational poetic community. Translation is yet another diffused activity that touches upon the selected creative and conceptual practices, providing an extra motive for gathering these poets together in this book.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three new reviews of Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness have appeared. Brian Reed’s “Chances of Rhyme“: The words transnational and globalization appear frequently within scholarship on contemporary poetry, but so far there have been few sustained attempts to narrate recent … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[66,50,1156,27,877,356,354,412,357,21],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-xg","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1774,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1774","url_meta":{"origin":2062,"position":0},"title":"Vitaly Chernetsky reviews Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"March 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Vitaly Chernetsky has reviewed Jacob Edmond's A Common Strangeness. It begins: Jacob Edmond has written a remarkable book\u2014impassioned, theoretically astute, and timely\u2014that deserves to garner significant response across many fields in the humanities. The tasks it sets to accomplish\u2014and succeeds admirably in doing so\u2014are manifold. First, it presents a compelling\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/commonstrangeness.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/08\/edmond_cover1.jpg?w=350&h=200&crop=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1812,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1812","url_meta":{"origin":2062,"position":1},"title":"Jonathan Stalling Reviews Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"April 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"MCLC has published Jonathan Stalling's review of Jacob Edmond's A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature. Here's how it begins: To begin with, Jacob Edmond's new book, A Common Strangeness, is anything but common and signals what I hope will be a new trend toward more ambitious studies\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ruminations"","block_context":{"text":"Ruminations","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=16"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1869,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1869","url_meta":{"origin":2062,"position":2},"title":"Jacob Edmond on Cosima Bruno on Yang Lian\u2019s Poetry through Translation","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"April 29, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"from Jacob Edmond's A Common Strangeness blog: I\u2019d like to draw your attention to a book published by Cosima Bruno and described below, entitled Between the Lines: Yang Lian\u2019s Poetry through Translation. Bruno\u2019s book makes a case for studying translations as a method of reading poetry. I\u2019m mentioning the book\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1189,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1189","url_meta":{"origin":2062,"position":3},"title":"Nicholas Reid on Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"September 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Nicholas Reid has reviewed Jacob Edmond's study of world literature & contemporary Chinese, Russian, and American poetry, A Common Strangeness. Here's how it begins: In the lives of poets, as in the lives of most other people, there has been a great change of consciousness worldwide over the last three\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-qrR_t5xmQy8\/UEgUINFi0LI\/AAAAAAAAAcw\/rPAx0dEhjWs\/s320\/Edmond_ACommonStrangeness.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":709,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=709","url_meta":{"origin":2062,"position":4},"title":"Jacob Edmond’s Common Strangeness Blog","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"February 10, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Poetry translator and scholar Jacob Edmond has a new blog to promote his forthcoming book, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (forthcoming from Fordham University Press). Using Walter Benjamin's take on Baudelaire and fl\u00e2nerie to take a new look at World Literature, Edmond reads Chinese poets Yang\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/commonstrangeness.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/08\/edmond_cover1.jpg?w=350&h=200&crop=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2260,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2260","url_meta":{"origin":2062,"position":5},"title":"A Common Strangeness runner-up for ASAP 2013 Prize","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"November 1, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Jacob Edmond's A Common Strangeness has been named runner-up for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2013 Book Prize. ASAP\u2019s citation reads: In this remarkable book, comparative literature outdoes itself, becoming fully contemporary and transnational: Edmond innovates a genuinely global poetics that discovers the fullest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2062"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2078,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062\/revisions\/2078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}