This book begins with two questions: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? Insofar as it responds to these questions, the book is a history of the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that have shaped the aesthetics of globalization from the late–Cold War period to today. But the book is also ... More

This book begins with two questions: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? Insofar as it responds to these questions, the book is a history of the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that have shaped the aesthetics of globalization from the late–Cold War period to today. But the book is also a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular. It explores what it is possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual. Instead of dichotomies, it offers a triangulated, multilingual, comparative approach to literary studies. Moving among avant-garde poetic examples from China, Russia, and the United States, it traces a series of cross-cultural encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, A Common Strangeness tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.