China in a Polycentric World

by Zhang, Yingjin

• ISBN13: 9780804731867
• ISBN10: 0804731861
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-02-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

This collection provides a critical reexamination of the development and current status of comparative literature studies that engage the literary practices of both China and the West. In so doing, it attempts to refashion literary methodologies and cultural theories in Chinese studies and reread several noncanonical texts in ways that cut across disciplines, genders, and modernities. Eschewing conventional taxonomies such as the study of literary influences and parallels, this volume shifts the emphasis from Chinese-Western comparativism to a critical rereading of Chinese or China-related texts using a variety of new critical approaches. Essays that draw on literary history, comparative poetics, modernist aesthetics, feminist studies, gender theory, and postcolonial discourse exemplify how multifaceted approaches can enrich our understanding of this field. The essays are grouped in three parts: studies of disciplines, institutions, and canon formation; gender, sexuality, and the body; and technology, modernity, and aesthetics. They cover a range of subjects, including the challenge of East-West comparative literature, the impact of literary theory on Sinological research, canon formation in traditional Chinese poetry, gender and sexuality in Ming drama, contemporary Chinese fiction and television drama, the problem of translation, the influence of science fiction, and the "cult of poetry" in post-Mao China. The introductory chapter traces the rise of the Chinese school of comparative literature and addresses the issues facing Western scholars of Chinese-Western comparative literature. A concluding chapter summarizes recent remappings of the geocultural world and outlines future possibilities for comparative literature.

Author Biography

Yingjin Zhang is Associate Professor of Chinese, Comparative Literature, and Film Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Table of Contents

Contributors	XI	(2)
A Note on Romanization	XIII
Introduction: Engaging Chinese Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies	1	(20)
YINGJIN ZHANG
PART ONE: DISCIPLINE, DISCOURSE, CANON	21	(52)
1. The Challenge of East-West Comparative Literature	21	(15)
ZHANG LONGXI
2. The Utopias of Discourse: On the Impossibility of Chinese Comparative Literature	36	(14)
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
3. Canon Formation in Traditional Chinese Poetry: Chinese Canons, Sacred and Profane	50	(23)
MARK E. FRANCIS
PART TWO: GENDER, SEXUALITY, BODY	73	(60)
4. A Feminist Re-Vision of Xu Wei's Ci Mulan and Nu zhuangyuan	73	(17)
ANN-MARIE HSIUNG
5. Gender, Subjectivity, Sexuality: Defining a Subversive Discourse in Wang Anyi's Four Tales of Sexual Transgression	90	(20)
HELEN H. CHEN
6. Consuming Asian Women: The Fluid Body of Josie Packard in Twin Peaks	110	(23)
GRETA AI-YU NIU
PART THREE: SCIENCE, MODERNITY, AESTHETICS	133	(102)
7. Travel and Translation: An Aspect of China's Cultural Modernity, 1862-1926	133	(19)
JOHN YU ZOU
8. Baoyu in Wonderland: Technological Utopia in the Early Modern Chinese Science Fiction Novel	152	(21)
FENG-YING MING
9. The Texture of the Metropolis: Modernist Inscriptions of Shanghai in the 1930s	173	(15)
YINGJIN ZHANG
10. The Cult of Poetry in Contemporary China	188	(30)
MICHELLE YEH
11. Tianya, the Ends of the World or the Edge of Heaven: Comparative Literature at the Fin de Siecle	218	(17)
EUGENE CHEN EOYANG
REFERENCE MATTER	235
Notes	235	(48)
Character List	283	(18)
Index	301