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. (shrink)

The special issue’s editors introduce the rationale for the following articles, all of which take up aspects of the relations among the production of artworks, the behavior of audiences, and the state’s interest in assembling, regulating, and transforming what it knows as its people through the responses to art.

The iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527-1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial writings and actions powerfully shaped late-Ming print culture, commentarial and epistolary practice, discourses on authenticity and selfhood, attitudes toward friendship and masculinity, displays of filial piety, understandings of the public and private spheres, views toward women, and perspectives on Buddhism and the afterlife. In this volume, leading sinologists demonstrate the interrelatedness of seemingly discrete aspects of Li Zhi's (...) thought and emphasize the far-reaching impact of his ideas and actions on both his contemporaries and his successors. In doing so, they challenge the myth that there was no tradition of dissidence in premodern China. (shrink)

The iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527-1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial writings and actions powerfully shaped late-Ming print culture, commentarial and epistolary practice, discourses on authenticity and selfhood, attitudes toward friendship and masculinity, displays of filial piety, understandings of the public and private spheres, views toward women, and perspectives on Buddhism and the afterlife. In this volume, leading sinologists demonstrate the interrelatedness of seemingly discrete aspects of Li Zhi's (...) thought and emphasize the far-reaching impact of his ideas and actions on both his contemporaries and his successors. In doing so, they challenge the myth that there was no tradition of dissidence in premodern China. (shrink)

Li Zhi's iconoclastic interpretations of history, religion, literature, and social relations have fascinated Chinese intellectuals for centuries. His approach synthesized Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ethics and incorporated the Neo-Confucian idealism of such thinkers as Wang Yangming. The result was a series of heretical writings that caught fire among Li Zhi's contemporaries, despite an imperial ban on their publication, and intrigued Chinese audiences long after his death. Translated for the first time into English, Li Zhi's bold challenge to established doctrines will (...) captivate anyone curious about the origins of such subtly transgressive works as the sixteenth-century play _The Peony Pavilion_ or the eighteenth-century novel _Dream of the Red Chamber_. In _A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep _, Li Zhi confronts accepted ideas about gender, questions the true identity of history's heroes and villains, and offers his own readings of Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha. Fond of vivid sentiment and sharp expression, Li Zhi made no distinction between high and low literary genres in his literary analysis. He refused to support sanctioned ideas about morality and wrote stinging social critiques. Li Zhi praised scholars who risked everything to expose extortion and misrule. In this sophisticated translation, English-speaking readers encounter the best of this heterodox intellectual's vital contribution to Chinese thought and culture. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The article explores the interface between literature and ideas by highlighting a core »literary« idea, the notion of the text itself. All »text-immanent« interpretation reposes, after all, on the work of editors. Recent debates in textual editing are reviewed to demonstrate how difficult – or for some, how undesirable – it is to fix the identity of the text. Both orthodox and antinomian positions on textual identity are themselves fueled by »ideas.«.

When Chinese literary thought is put in a global context, it is often characterized by its disinterest in mimesis and its correlative faith in the legibility of direct lyrical expression, both of which features would derive from a general epistemic optimism common to all schools of Chinese thought. Early writing on music, however, attests to a distrust of the art and to a consequent urge for reform. Suspicious mimesis, linked with the promotion of moral exemplars, is shown in this historical (...) essay to be the ground of aesthetics in the Confucian tradition. (shrink)

‘Translation’ is one of our all-purpose metaphors for almost any kind of mediation or connection: we ask of a principle how it ‘translates’ into practice, we announce initiatives to ‘translate’ the genome into predictions, and so forth. But the metaphor of translation — of the discovery of equivalents and their mutual substitution — so attracts our attention that we forget the other kinds of inter-linguistic contact, such as transcription, mimicry, borrowing or calque. In a curious echo of the macaronic writings (...) of the era of the dawn of print, the twentieth century's avant-garde, already foreseeing the end of print culture, experimented with hybrid languages. Their untranslatability under the usual definitions of ‘translation’ suggests a revival of this avant-garde practice, as the mainstream aesthetic of the moment invests in ‘convergence’ and the subsumption of all media into digital code. (shrink)

The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire. By Henrietta Harrison. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 329. $30.