A common strangeness : contemporary poetry, cross-cultural encounter, comparative literature / Jacob Edmond.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-264) and index.

Yang Lian and the Flâneur in exile -- Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and poetic correspondences -- Lyn Hejinian and Russian estrangement -- Bei Dao and world literature -- Dmitri Prigov and cross-cultural conceptualism -- Charles Bernstein and broken English.

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.