Seeing Through Abstraction

Literary Encounters with Information in Modern China

Anatoly Detwyler

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Hardback

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English

Columbia University Press
14 October 2025

During the first half of the twentieth century, China saw sweeping changes in the material conditions and practices of communication, transforming the volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value of information. Encountering the new abstract matter of information, a generation of Chinese writers faced a crisis of literary identity: What made literature distinct from other informational genres, such as newspaper columns, financial figures, and telegrams? How was the emergent information order reshaping individual and social knowledge? And where would literature stand within this new order?

This book examines how writers of the Republican era (1912-1949) came to recognize and respond to ""information."" Anatoly Detwyler investigates a wide range of literary and graphic experiments that engaged with different forms of information management, including data visualization, financial statistics, and propaganda science. These works, he argues, collectively attest to a new perceptibility of abstraction and its epistemological implications for apprehending reality. Tracing this mode of perception across fiction, poetry, and woodcut art, Seeing Through Abstraction offers a revisionist account of the development of modern Chinese literature and repositions it within the global history of the information age.

By: Anatoly Detwyler
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231219891
ISBN 10: 023121989X
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 14 October 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Anatoly Detwyler is an assistant professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a coeditor of Information: A Reader and Literary Information in China: A History, both published by Columbia University Press in 2021.

Reviews for Seeing Through Abstraction: Literary Encounters with Information in Modern China

Seeing Through Abstraction is a compelling and innovative work of scholarship, revealing for the first time the ways in which modern Chinese literature was ‘informed’ by the question of information. -- Andrew F. Jones, author of <i>Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s</i>