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

Avant-garde Orientalism: The Eastern 'Other' in Twentieth-Century Travel Narrative and Poetry

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

1. Introduction

            Avant-garde offensive

            Avant-garde orientalism, or a visionary exoticism

            Discontinuous itineraries

 

2. The Poetics of Travel, Postcolonial Criticism, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde

            Travel theory's assimilation of postcolonial method: MacCannell, Said

            The Derridean inflection and the emergence of the hybrid: Spivak, Bhabha

            Global ideoscapes, postmodern tourists, and postmillennial reconsiderations:

                        Appadurai, Kaplan, Almond

            Theorists of the Avant-Garde: Poggioli, Bürger, Horkheimer and Adorno

 

3. A Literary Genealogy of Avant-garde Orientalism

            Romanticist origins of avant-garde orientalism

            Mann's Venice as fatal gateway to the East

            Kafka's French Algerian penal colony

            Tearing up the colonies: arbitrary arbiters and itinerant marginals in Genet and

                        Duras

<            From avant-garde affront to postmodern indifference: Geoff Dyer's East/West<

                        Split

           

4. The Maghreb and Tangier

            A hermeneutics of aggression and reciprocity

            From pastoral to horror: Gide and Bowles in the Maghreb

            "Innaresting sexual arrangement": William Burroughs takes Tangier

 

5.  Egypt and Palestine

            Fecundity of the dead: Cocteau meets the pharaohs

            Muscular impotence: Marinetti's futurist Egypt

            Durrell's Alexandria

            Pynchon's Baedeker farce and the automata of empire

            A Bengali Indian in Egypt: Amitav Ghosh's medieval alternative

            The songs of the fedayeen: Saint Genet among the lions

 

6.  India

     Disembodied India: Frederic Prokosch's The Asiatics

            Barbarian sightings: the Lacanian subject of Henri Michaux

            A labyrinth of multitudes: Octavio Paz's embassy to the outcastes

            The Beats in the jungle: Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Snyder, and Kyger

 

7.  Conclusion: The Far East

            Segalen, Michaux, and Barthes: from diversity to "the clangor of cymbals"  

            World literature and simultaneous contrasts