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? In A Common Strangeness, Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flâneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of 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, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.
"This is an engaging and bold study, which combines skillful close reading with theoretical astuteness."
The Russian Review
"In this ambitious and rich work, Jacob Edmond explores the relationship between recent poetry and globalism. Rejecting both the traditional East/West binary and the local/global opposition which he sees as its replacement, Edmond maps out the middle ground- an area of contact and exchange in which seemingly disparate poets pursued a common poetics of strangeness in the post- Cold War years."
Slavic and East European Journal
"There is no doubt that A Common Strangeness, with its focal point in the aesthetic concept and device of estrangement, is a valuable contribution to recent scholarship that aims at finding new ways to look at the intricate network of relations of poetry to the world."
