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From his premature death in 1919 until the final decades of the twentieth century, the French traveller, author, and naval doctor Victor Segalen remained relatively obscure, his extensive work on exoticism largely unavailable. With the appearance of the Complete Works in 1995, the dramatic scope and wide-ranging implications of his reflections on diversity were at last fully apparent. Segalen's understanding of the exotic is radically different from that of his colonial contemporaries. His exoticism - or Aesthetics of Diversity - focuses on the instability of contact between different cultures and represents a unique response to the decline of diversity triggered by colonialism and Westernization. Recent attention to Segalen in a variety of fields - post-modern sociology, post-colonialism, literary criticism, anthropology - indicates his role as a precursory theorist of the exotic whose work is of increasing contemporary relevance. At a moment when exoticism is rapidly emerging as a term of critical currency, this study of the genesis of Segalen's aesthetics is a timely contribution to work in this area.
The “Other”—source of fear and fascination; emblem of difference demonized and romanticized. Theories of alterity and cultural diversity abound in the contemporary academic landscape. Victor Segalen’s early attempt to theorize the exotic is a crucial reference point for all discussions of alterity, diversity, and ethnicity. Written over the course of fourteen years between 1904 and 1918, at the height of the age of imperialism, Essay on Exoticism encompasses Segalen’s attempts to define “true Exoticism.” This concept, he hoped, would not only replace nineteenth-century notions of exoticism that he considered tawdry and romantic, but also redirect his contemporaries’ propensit...
In this entrancing story of spiritual adventure, a Westerner in Peking seeks the mystery at the heart of the Forbidden City. He takes as a tutor in Chinese the young Belgian René Leys, who claims to be in the know about strange goings-on in the Imperial Palace: love affairs, family quarrels, conspiracies that threaten the very existence of the empire. But whether truth-teller or trickster, the elusive and ever-charming René presents his increasingly dazzled disciple with a visionary glimpse of "an essential palace built upon the most magnificent foundations."
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Victor Segalen was a French naval doctor, archeologist, ethnographer, explorer, writer, poet, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic. He traveled to China in 1909-1914 and again in 1917. This book examines his 'Chinese works' to determine his choice and adaptation of Chinese material and to shed light on any obscure allusions. It also points out the distinctive features and inherent problems that place each test in a genre of its own.
Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was a doctor, a traveller (principally in Polynesia and China), and above all else, a great poet. An admirer especially of Gauguin and Rimbaud, the journey undertaken in this, his last and most important work, is that between the imagined and the real: 'neither a poem about a journey, nor the travel diary of a wanderer's dream'. Journey to the Land of the Real is the summation of the author's life as both traveller and poet, and a summation that is all the more surprising since he could know nothing of his imminent and mysterious death.
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In this entrancing story of spiritual adventure, a Westerner in Peking seeks the mystery at the heart of the Forbidden City. He takes as a tutor in Chinese the young Belgian René Leys, who claims to be in the know about strange goings-on in the Imperial Palace: love affairs, family quarrels, conspiracies that threaten the very existence of the empire. But whether truth-teller or trickster, the elusive and ever-charming René presents his increasingly dazzled disciple with a visionary glimpse of " an essential palace built upon the most magnificent foundations."
Sensual Reading is a collection of essays that attempts to rearticulate the relationship between reading and the different senses as a way of moving beyond increasingly homogenized discourses of the "body" and the "subject." Contributions engage with the individual senses, with the themes of sensory richness and sensory deprivation, and with the notion of "telesensuality."