European modernism often imagined aesthetic form as a way to overcome mediation: to make alienated experience, fragmented sociality, or absent truth appear immediately whole or present. At the same time, Edward Said identifies one of the core mechanisms of imperial representation as how it effaces its own mediation of the Orient, as if representation delivered “presence” rather than “re-presence.” This panel explores to what extent the modernist fantasy of formal immediacy was historically enabled by a fantasy of immediacy built into Orientalist representation. We welcome papers that engage, on the one side, the European modernist relationship to form, and on the other side, the European modernist relationship to the Orientalized other, and moreover the complex relationship between the two.

Though this discussion extends beyond the China–European modernism connection, it takes as its point of departure Woolf’s infamous description of the artist Lily Briscoe’s “Chinese eyes.” Christopher Bush’s 2010 book Ideographic Modernism detailed how the idea of “China” for Western modernist writers served as a means for performatively thinking through writing itself and apparent problems with signification and communication in modern experience. Through Bush’s work, we can begin to understand how the “Chinese eyes” figure goes beyond what Patricia Laurence called a new mode of self-estranged perception developing in England. Rather, “Chinese eyes” exemplifies the constitutive bond between the modernist idea of the Oriental and the aesthetic aspirations of the modernist artist. 

Christopher Bush will serve as respondent. 

Topics might include modernism and imperialism; formal and Oriental immediacy; Imagism and the ideogram; visuality, intermediality, and translation; postcolonial/peripheral/semi-peripheral modernisms; primitivism; “Eastern” spirituality in modernist aesthetics; and New Formalist, materialist, and world-literary approaches to modernist form.