CAMBRIA PRESS blog

Nobel Laureate GAO Xingjian will be at the Cambria Press booth (#316) on Friday (Jan 4) at 1:15–1:45 p.m. to sign copies of his most recent book, Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation. Gao’s book has been published just in time for the 2013 MLA Annual Convention!

The book takes the title Aesthetics and Creation from the name of the Chinese collection from which most of these essays are drawn, but it also includes some of Gao Xingjian’s most recent unpublished essays. University of Sydney academic Mabel Lee is the translator, and the book also includes her authoritative introductory essay that contextualizes Gao’s significant position as an independent and uncompromising voice in the noisy hype of the globalized world of the present in which creative writers and artists are forced to conform with the demands of political and other group agendas, or with market forces, in order to survive. In incisive and cogently argued essays, he exposes the political dynamics of so-called “modernity” in Western literature and art, and how this has been enthusiastically embraced in China since the 1980s. In other essays he analyses traditional and modern European and Chinese notions of fiction, theatre, and art and elaborates on what aspects of writers and artists from both cultures have informed him in developing his own aesthetics in narration, performance and the visual arts. These essays testify to the extent of the cosmopolitanism of his aesthetics that both informs and is manifested in his literary and art creations.

This book signing precedes Gao’s two sessions “Gao Xingjian on Literature and Theater” on Friday and “A Creative Conversation with Gao Xingjian” on Saturday. It is advisable to purchase your copy before the book-signing session. The Cambria Press booth will begin selling copies as early as 9 a.m. on Friday. A special MLA discounted rate will also be provided for early purchases. There are a limited number of copies, so please get to the Cambria Press booth as soon as possible so as not to miss this rare opportunity of having your book signed by a Nobel Prize winner!

There is a lso a special Facebook promotion so that even those who are not attending the MLA annual convention will have an opportunity to get a signed copy of this new book. Like Cambria Press on Facebook AND share this post publicly on Facebook, and you will automatically entered into a drawing for a free, signed copy of the book. The book will be shipped free of charge to your address too!

Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation is part of the Cambria Sinophone World Series (General Editor: Victor H. Mair).

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