Reading Zhongyong as “Focusing the Familiar”

Intended as part of a follow-up book-length project of Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody (Lexington Books, 2018), this paper continues the arguments regarding how function words could play such decisive but often unrecognized roles in surreptitiously and even often serendipitously impacting our reading not only within but also across disciplines and cultures. The paper argues, in other words, how this underestimated role of function words, as in the case of the modal particle ye 也, could play just as important a role in Zhongyong 《中庸》 (The Doctrine of the Mean) as the equally commonplace definite article “the,” the conjunction“and,” and preposition and conjunction“after,” etc. in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (to be discussed in another paper given the limit of space) in accordance with the linguistic environments or contexts that define the particular textual expressions within the given cultural milieu and literary genre. Along these lines, we can also better understand the intricate relationships between meaning and sound, mind and rhythm, eye and ear, and intra- and extra-linguistic elements, for a healthy counterbalance to our habitual emphasis on meaning or its cultural and visual appearance, often at the expense of sound. In this way, we can understand how otherwise“silent” or insignificant sound that each function word enlivens also influences the way we read or interpret both poetry and prose.