Seeing Through Abstraction

"About modern Chinese literature's fraught and formative encounter with a changing information order during the Republican era (1912-1949). As sweeping transformations in the material conditions and social practices of communication expanded the volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value of information, a generation of writers was confronted with a crisis of literary identity: How could literature "know" the changing information order and analyze its social importance and individual impact? What distinguished literature from "information genres" such as newspaper stories, financial figures, telegrams, or bureaucratic reports? Such questions helped inspire a redefinition of a new literature, and in turn played a central role in the foundation of a movement to establish a "New Culture" in China. For the promoters of this movement, the proper recognition and understanding of the new information order would be necessary both for advocating scientific and democratic values to modernize the Chinese nation, and, on the other hand, for resisting sociocultural dissipation at the hands of Western imperialism, techno-scientific abstractions, and advanced capitalism. The stakes of sorting out information vis-à-vis literature (and vice versa) were high. Seeing Through Information investigates the development of a self-avowedly modern literature in relation to three major genres of information that emerged during the period: data visualization, financial figures and statistics, and news reports and propaganda. In detailing how this encounter contributed to the remaking of Chinese literature, the book argues for understanding abstraction and its discontents as central to the historical experience of modernity"-- Provided by publisher.