Ezra Pound

Christopher Bush

Haun Saussy

Timothy Billings

A Critical Edition

Cathay

A groundbreaking account of translation and identity in the Chinese literary tradition before 1850—with important ramifications for today Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China. The Making of Barbarians offers an account of world literature in which China, as center, produces its own margins. Here Sinologist and comparatist Haun Saussy investigates the meanings of literary translation, adaptation, and appropriation on the boundaries of China long before it came into sustained contact with the West. When scholars talk about comparative literature in Asia, they tend to focus on translation between European languages and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as practiced since about 1900. In contrast, Saussy focuses on the period before 1850, when the translation of foreign works into Chinese was rare because Chinese literary tradition overshadowed those around it. The Making of Barbarians looks closely at literary works that were translated into Chinese from foreign languages or resulted from contact with alien peoples. The book explores why translation was such an undervalued practice in premodern China, and how this vast and prestigious culture dealt with those outside it before a new group of foreigners—Europeans—appeared on the horizon.

Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia

The Making of Barbarians

Steven G. Yao

Eric Hayot

'Sinographies' examines topics like colonialism, literary modernism, translation, anime, and Tibet. As a whole, this volume imagines sinography as a new methodological approach to the study of China, one that clears ground for new kinds of comparative work.

Writing China

Sinographies

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”—core ideas of modern literary theory—were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts—starting with Homer and the Bible—had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian “techniques of the body” as belonging to the domain of Derridean “arche-writing,” Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.

Orality and Its Technologies

The Ethnography of Rhythm

The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic calls for and applies a new model of comparative literature - one that, instead of taking for granted the commensurability of traditions and texts, gives incompatibility and contradiction their due. Exposing contemporary literary theory to the risks of ancient Chinese literature (and vice versa), this book considers a linked series of case studies. To what degree does the translation between languages and texts that we call comparative literature depend on allegory or translation within a single text or language? The author offers an important, new perspective on the reading of the Shih-ching or Book of Odes and the question of allegory and metaphor in the Chinese poetic tradition.

The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic

César Domínguez

Dario Villanueva

Introducing Comparative Literature is a comprehensive guide to the field offering clear, concise information alongside useful analysis and examples. It frames the introduction within recent theoretical debates and shifts in the discipline whilst also addressing the history of the field and its practical application. Looking at Comparative Literature within the context of globalization, cosmopolitanism and post or transnationalism, the book also offers engagement and comparison with other visual media such as cinema and e-literature. The first four chapters address the broad theoretical issues within the field such as 'interliterary theory', decoloniality, and world literature, while the next four are more applied, looking at themes, translation, literary history and comparison with other arts. This engaging guide also contains a glossary of terms and concepts as well as a detailed guide to further reading.

New Trends and Applications

Introducing Comparative Literature

Minglu Gao

Roger Des Forges

Chiao-mei Liu

A Multidisciplinary Perspective

Chinese Walls in Time and Space

Pauline C. Lee

Rivi Handler-Spitz

Iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial words and actions shaped print culture, literary practice, attitudes toward gender, and perspectives on Buddhism and the afterlife. Although banned, his writings were never fully suppressed, because they tapped into issues of vital significance to generations of readers. His incisive remarks, along with the emotional intensity and rhetorical power with which he delivered them, made him an icon of his cultural moment and an emblem of early modern Chinese intellectual dissent. In this volume, leading China scholars demonstrate the interrelatedness of seemingly discrete aspects of Li Zhi’s thought and emphasize his far-reaching impact on his contemporaries and successors. In doing so, they challenge the myth that there was no tradition of dissidence in premodern China.

Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China

The Objectionable Li Zhi

This volume examines translation from many different angles: it explores how translations change the languages in which they occur, how works introduced from other languages become part of the consciousness of native speakers, and what strategies translators must use to secure acceptance for foreign works. Haun Saussy argues that translation doesn't amount to the composition, in one language, of statements equivalent to statements previously made in another language. Rather, translation works with elements of the language and culture in which it arrives, often reconfiguring them irreversibly: it creates, with a fine disregard for precedent, loan-words, calques, forced metaphors, forged pasts, imaginary relationships, and dialogues of the dead. Creativity, in this form of writing, usually considered merely reproductive, is the subject of this book. The volume takes the history of translation in China, from around 150 CE to the modern period, as its source of case studies. When the first proponents of Buddhism arrived in China, creativity was forced upon them: a vocabulary adequate to their purpose had yet to be invented. A Chinese Buddhist textual corpus took shape over centuries despite the near-absence of bilingual speakers. One basis of this translating activity was the rewriting of existing Chinese philosophical texts, and especially the most exorbitant of all these, the collection of dialogues, fables, and paradoxes known as the Zhuangzi. The Zhuangzi also furnished a linguistic basis for Chinese Christianity when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in the later part of the Ming dynasty and allowed his friends and associates to frame his teachings in the language of early Daoism. It would function as well when Xu Zhimo translated from The Flowers of Evil in the 1920s. The chance but overdetermined encounter of Zhuangzi and Baudelaire yielded a 'strange music' that retroactively echoes through two millennia of Chinese translation, outlining a new understanding of the translator's craft that cuts across the dividing lines of current theories and critiques of translation.

Zhuangzi Inside Out

Translation as Citation

Kang-i Sun Chang

Charles Yim-tze Kwong

The book also includes an extended section of criticism by and about women writers.

An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism

Women Writers of Traditional China

Darío Villanueva

Introducing Comparative Literature is a comprehensive guide to the field offering clear, concise information alongside useful analysis and examples. It frames the introduction within recent theoretical debates and shifts in the discipline whilst also addressing the history of the field and its practical application. Looking at Comparative Literature within the context of globalization, cosmopolitanism and post or transnationalism, the book also offers engagement and comparison with other visual media such as cinema and e-literature. The first four chapters address the broad theoretical issues within the field such as ‘interliterary theory’, decoloniality, and world literature, while the next four are more applied, looking at themes, translation, literary history and comparison with other arts. This engaging guide also contains a glossary of terms and concepts as well as a detailed guide to further reading.

Focuses on the influence of multiculturalism as a concept transforming literary and cultural studies. This book offers a comprehensive survey of comparative criticism in the 1990s. It demonstrates that comparative critical strategies can provide insights into the world's changing, and increasingly colliding, cultures.

Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, politics, philosophy), Haun Saussy calls out the typical vices of comparison and proposes ways to unseat them. For however much it is abused, distorted, and manipulated, comparison retains an essential link to the idea of justice.

Haun Saussy

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