Haun Saussy

À l’instar des sciences naturelles, les sciences humaines et littéraires font appel à un vocabulaire spécialisé. Les termes et les concepts qui constituent ce lexique ont chacun une origine déterminée : on attribuera sans peine la mimésis à Platon et à Aristote, la sublimité à Longin, et ainsi de suite. Le vocabulaire des études littéraires est donc le résultat d’une longue suite d’expériences, autrement dit, d’exemples. Quand nos lectures nous éloignent des langues et civilisations familière..

ntroducing 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.

Introduction Genealogy and Titles of the Female Poet Why this anthology? Why "women writers of traditional China"? An anecdotal answer: In the autumn of 1735, Wang Su, the husband of Mao Xiuhui (p.8g), went to Nanjing to take the provincial examination. His posi-tion as a ...

What is involved in framing a counterfactual? Let’s say I have a daydream about living in Shakespeare’s time. Who would I be and what would I do? Well, I’d go to the Globe, that much I know for sure, and bring a notebook. Of course, it is impossible for me to have lived in Shakespeare’s time, for the “me” that is having this revery is the result of genealogies, circumstances, and relationships that cannot be displaced from the second half of the twentieth century without tearing apart the structure of all world history. To have this imagination, I must first assume that there is a “me” that can be transported into times and places whose definition excludes that “me.” Perhaps the concept of an essential self or soul derives from the wish to pursue such scenarios beyond the point at which they crash into inescapable contradictions.

The Chinese philosophical text Zhuangzi is said to be the work of one Zhuang Zhou (4th century BCE), about whom little is known. Critical work on the text of the Zhuangzi usually attributes the “inner” or core chapters to Zhuang Zhou and the rest to his “school.” The historical texts, however, give little reason to believe that the “inner chapters” are the earliest. If the supposed author is merely a name affixed to a stance of radical skepticism, applied to the common ideas of the time by a series of rhetorical masters, the text becomes an accretion of arguments privileging not the first to take shape, but the last. Analogously, this text’s role in the history of Chinese translation as the “sponsor” of works from abroad that acquire Chinese form by echoing the Zhuangzi reverses the usual assumptions about the inside and outside, the core and periphery, of Chinese culture.

Buddhist ideas were transmitted to China over a period of several hundred years, originally via Central Asia and later through direct contact with Indian believers. Translation was essential to this process of conversion—arguably the most consequential in world history—but the mechanisms of translation remain unfamiliar. Documents indicate that for the first three centuries of Buddhist influence, source texts in Indic languages were almost never directly accessible to the Chinese “translators,” who worked, rather, from paraphrases dictated by speakers of one or another Central Asian language; these paraphrases were then worked up into acceptable literary Chinese by scribes unacquainted with Sanskrit, Pali, or any other foreign tongue. The means whereby Buddhist ideas achieved acceptance in China therefore had little to do with fidelity to an original and much to do with adaptation to the Chinese cultural context through patchworks and redeployments of Chinese predecessor texts with ...

A tenacious tradition considers the lyric as the manifestation of a subjectivity, whether personal or universal. But folk traditions as well as the twentieth-century avant-gardes offer the counter-example of poetry that arises from the collocation of verbal fragments, of artificial languages, of subjects in name only, and dare to present these as a new-style lyric. Less startling versions of this displacement of the lyric subject occur in such artifacts as the overheard poem. For such poems, the fact of publication replaces the mythic occasion of utterance as the poem’s moment of truth. This foregrounding of the moment of production is a feature linking the so-called primitive, oral, or folk poetry of many cultures to the purportedly post-humanist poetry of the different avant-gardes, and it links them, not through an irony, metaphor or coincidence, but through a model of the function of the artwork that indeed puts the act of signifying temporally and axiologically before the signi...

The modernist, critical turn in Chinese historiography in the first years of the twentieth century created space for new categories, narrative frameworks, and kinds of explanation. The generation of the 1910s and 1920s took advantage of this, offering new conceptions of the distant origins of Chinese civilization and suggesting different ways of narrating China’s development, one of which was the coexistence and interaction of ethnic groups. Under the pressure of Japanese invasion in the 1930s and the prominence of a Japanese historiography that made the differences among ethnicities seem greater than their union in the Chinese empire, Chinese history-writing reverted to a reverential attitude toward an immemorial “Chineseness.” The advent of a socialist government changed the balance. In more recent years, world history, economic history, and the rethinking of the “imagined community” have become prominent, as Chinese historians wrestle with different problems raised by coexistence...

In April 1994, the University of Trento and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences organized a conference on the life and work of the Jesuit missionary and pioneer Sinologist Martino Martini (1614—61). This volume—the English-language counterpart of versions in Italian and Chinese—collects the papers delivered at that conference.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)The Invitation:In April 1915 a slim volume of verse was published by Elkin Mathews in London, Cathay: For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga. Ezra Pound's Cathay is just 100 years old, and we all know what it did to transform English--- language poetry (especially American). It has also generated some fine scholarship over the years- and lots of interesting disagreement. With a century of changing perspectives now behind us, wouldn't it be a good moment (however adventitious) to sit down and talk about the differences that Cathay made, and the differences between its earliest readers' responses and ours today, and other related topics?Here's what I would like to invite you to, if you like the idea: a conversation over email about Cathay, to be pursued in odd moments over the next few weeks or possibly months, following the turns of real conversation. At some point I would then edit it down and send it to each of you for final approval and revisions. What do you think? A little hundredth---birthday party for the slim khaki---colored volume.The Conversation:Haun Saussy: Everyone acknowledges that the appearance in 1915 of Cathay did something to change the style and manner of American poetry- and over the years, English poetry too. Just what that "something" was we might want to spend some time trying to pin down; also how it happened, how the Imagist idea of what a poem is took root and found partisans. It is astonishing that these changes should have begun with a translation from a language, Chinese, that had done very little to affect English writing up to then. A language, too, that the "translator" (a two---headed prodigy, Fenollosa---Pound) did not quite know (Pound knowing less than Fenollosa at this point, Fenollosa largely dependent on his Japanese intermediaries). Now reorientations in literary style and sensibility often come as a result of translations. As Pound himself observed, most innovations in English verse have come about as a result of "steals from the French." But usually the precondition of such an effect is hundreds of years of close contact between the languages involved (at literary and everyday levels). The literatures of England have been mediating Latin since the time of Caedmon, French since 1066, Italian since Chaucer, and so forth. Chinese poetry was an unknown in 1915, and it is astonishing to see it taking in short order the role of a model for what modern poetry ought to be. How could we account for this prodigious irruption, made through one slender volume of short poems in the second year of a terrible war?Marjorie Perloff: I think the "prodigious irruption" took place in response to the maudlin verses of the Georgian poets who were Pound's contemporaries in the England of 1915. Here's an average one by Frank Prewett:To My Mother in Canada, from Sick---Bed in ItalyDear mother, from the sure sun and warm seasOf Italy, I, sick, remember nowWhat sometimes is forgot in times of ease,Our love, the always felt but unspoken vow.So send I beckoning hands from here to there,And kiss your black once, now white thin---grown hairAnd your stooped small shoulder and pinched brow.Here, mother, there is sunshine every day;It warms the bones and breathes upon the heart;But you I see out---plod a little way,Bitten with cold; your cheeks and fingers smart.Would you were here, we might in temples lie,And look from azure into azure sky,And paradise achieve, slipping death''s part.But now 'tis time for sleep: I think no speechThere needs to pass between us what we mean,For we soul---venturing mingle each with each.So, mother, pass across the world unseenAnd share in me some wished---for dream in you;For so brings destiny her pledges true,The mother withered, in the son grown green. …

<jats:p>Dead at thirty, and author of a barely-noticed book of verses printed for hire by a firm specializing in erotica, the small-town eccentric and invalid Tristan Corbière (1845-1875) was destined for oblivion. But Paul Verlaine's short book Les Poètes maudits (1878) put him in the company of Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and ensured that he would continue to be read.</jats:p>

Translation as Citation denies that translating amounts to the composition, in one language, of statements equivalent to statements previously made in another. 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. 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 pa...

Nineteenth-century origin stories about culture and poetry assume a pattern of development and diversification from a single starting point—be that a primitive language or a single ethnic community. But according to twentieth-century models, the development of culture depends on the clash of different patterns of activity that disrupt the forward movement of simple rhythms. Marcel Mauss’s account of the techniques of the body and Ezra Pound’s practices of translation supply two examples of the breaking of rhythm and the creation of new cultural patterns, sometimes in response to the destruction of European ideals in the Great War.

distinctly European genealogy. After all, nearly all modern motifs and arguments of anti-Eurocentric critique were forged by Europeans in their critique of Imperialism and modern colonialism, of their very own capitalism and racist politics; and they were appropriated by Post-Colonial Theory from the self-critique of Eurocentrism. And maybe this elliptical movement could point to the possibility that we are in the midst of a much longer historical cycle, and that the project of World Literature will be resuscitated by others, in a ricorso that will start where Europeans and their heirs left the project and the corpus of non-Eurocentric World Literature unfinished. Provincialising Europe, we should not be afraid to acknowledge its ancient weakness and marginality. For before and after Eurocentrism, this is where the tasks of translation and travelling and of documenting the corpora of non-European languages and literature originated. »In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is th...

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.

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.