Seeing Through Abstraction

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 Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960sInformation for Detwyler is not only a quantity, a value, a useful knowledge, but fundamentally, a perceptual apparatus—a way of seeing and knowing. In this defining book on the literary and cultural history of information in China, Detwyler challenges us to rethink modern visuality in terms of and beyond abstraction. – Weihong Bao, author of Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945

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.