2019 Vol. 2, No. 3

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The Global Significance of Chinese Culture: From the Perspective of Relations between the Enlightenment and Chinese Culture
ZHANG Xiping
2019, 2(3): 411-427.
Abstract:
Since the sixteenth century, when Chinese culture first encountered Western culture, Chinese culture has been spreading beyond the area of East Asia. After being translated into European languages by European missionaries, ancient Chinese culture has exerted a significant influence on the development of Modern European thought. In this paper, the worldwide significance of Chinese culture is illustrated from the perspective of relations between the Enlightenment and Chinese culture. This paper clarifies the translation, interpretation and acceptance of the Chinese classics and ancient Chinese culture in the European Enlightenment, revealing the universal significance of Chinese culture.
[Abstract](757) [PDF 13378KB](390)
Does European Enlightenment Have to Do with Chinese Culture? — A Response to Prof. ZHANG Xiping
LIU Yunhua
2019, 2(3): 428-441.
Abstract:
In terms of the issue of“the Chinese Vogue” in Europe from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Chinese academia has widely recognized that Chinese culture has an essential and decisive influence on European Enlightenment, and some scholars even believe that without China, the Europeans could not have become who they are or what they are today. This paper aims to rethink this issue by focusing on two important Enlightenment thinkers, Gottfried W. Leibniz and Nicolas de Malebranche, including their comprehension and interpretation of“Li,” a term from Confucianism. This paper also demonstrates that Natural Theology provided a good opportunity for the communication and interaction between Chinese and Western cultures during the Enlightenment. It is Natural Theology that underlies the two thinkers’ understanding of“Li.” However, Leibniz’s understanding of“Li” is a reverse reading of the European mainstream and differs from the opinions in two important texts, Traité sur quelques points de la religion des chinois by Nicolas Longobardi and Traité sur quelques points importans de la mission de la Chine by Antonio de Santa Maria. Leibniz’s reading, ostensibly based on Joachim Bouvet, was essentially on his own Natural Theology focusing of“Monad Theory.” However, the two thinkers’ explanation of“Li” deviates heavily from the original Chinese thought. It can be said that“Li” displays no essential in-fluence on the“Monad Theory,” but rather a con-fluence created from a sort of self-imagination. From this point of view, the philosophy of Leibniz does not have a substantial interaction with Chinese culture; that is to say, his philosophy is an ideological movement restricted to Europe, or rather a“self-growth.” Could such a judgement be applied to the trend of ideology and culture during the whole course of the Enlightenment? It is hard to answer 12 this question in a definite manner. This paper intends to argue that China was just an external force for European Enlightenment, a distant ideal that served as a role model for the Enlightenment thinkers’own self-reconstructions. Such a role model is basically the West’s self-expression through imagination of the Other (though not without similarities); in other words, the Enlightenment thinkers found what they had anticipated from China.
[Abstract](601) [PDF 11758KB](332)
Reading Zhongyong as “Focusing the Familiar”
CHEN Shudong
2019, 2(3): 442-458.
Abstract:
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.
[Abstract](363) [PDF 15818KB](280)
Several Faces of Ezra Pound: A Study Focused on the Translation and Introduction of the Six Principles of Imagism into China in the Early Twentieth Century
WU Ke
2019, 2(3): 459-476.
Abstract:
Chinese Researchers have paid great attention to the relationship between Ezra Pound and China, especially the relationship between his contribution and the origin and development of Chinese new poetry and Chinese modern literature. Some researchers even regard him as the Godfather of the Literary Revolution in 1917. Doubtlessly, Pound was introduced to China as a member of the Imagist poets at the very beginning, with a label of the revolutionist, which clearly revealed the left-wing position of Liu Yanling刘延 陵 (1894-1988) at that time. However, Liu and Xu Chi 徐迟 (1914-1996) overlooked the complicated development of Pound’s own theory, ignored the divergence of opinion between Pound and Amy Lowell on Imagist theory, and neglected the variation of the so-called Six Principles of Imagism as well. All these problems are still waiting to be fully reviewed today, or else it would bring about simplification and confusion in our understanding of Pound’s true meaning. Based on reviewing old newspapers and comparing foreign original texts with Chinese translated versions, it is not difficult for us to find out that there exists a lot of misreading, perhaps more appropriately, some inventions in the process of translation and introduction of Pound’s theory and the Six Principles of Imagism into China during the early 20s. For example, Hu Shi 胡适 (1891-1962) took the principle of freedom as the core of imagist theory, made the definition of freedom equal with the free verse, and even identified the liberty within literary domain with the capitalized Liberty referring more to political issues. We can also see the disappearing of the label “the revolutionist” from Liu’s text to Xu’s, and even tiny changes of words, worthy of tracing, in Xu’s variant versions in different historical contexts. Thus, I would like to clarify different interpretations of Pound and Lowell, and outline a clue to rethink new poetry and even new literature in China: from revolutionary discourses of the left-wing to the Third Men’s deviation from revolution; from political movements to commercial activities; from the combination of enlightenment and salvation to the dispute of cosmopolitanism and nationalism; from Russia to the US, etc. 1
[Abstract](510) [PDF 13419KB](357)
Nowhere is Home： J. M. Coetzee’s Wrestling with Home Inside/Outside In the Heart of the Country
DONG Liang
2019, 2(3): 477-491.
Abstract:
By emphasizing and analyzing the frequent appearance of the term nowhere in J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, I demonstrate the close correspondence between Coetzee’s unsettlement in South Africa in the 1970s and Magda, the female protagonist in In the Heart of the Country who fails to pursue an idealistic home on a remote farm. Coetzee’s authorship, or specifically speaking, his paradoxical feeling about South Africa, embodies itself in hostile coexistence with the rigorous censorship regime in South Africa and in his involvement in Afrikaner culture during this period. By choosing an anti-pastoral genre in an antirealistic narrative, Coetzee depicts a miserable picture of Magda’s struggle with her patriarchal father, rebellious coloured servants as well as her own identity crisis. The cruel answer for Magda is that nowhere could be the very place to accommodate the ethical values in her mind, though she attempts to subvert the patriarchal authority and seek reciprocity with the coloured servants. Magda’s tragedy provides us with an opportunity to explore the historical and ethical dimensions of the narrative and, beyond that, Coetzee’s wrestling with the issue of home.
[Abstract](345) [PDF 11464KB](278)
On the Conversion of the Poetic Position of Japanese Zhuzhi Ci and Its Relationship with Erotic Art and Literature
XIONG Xiao
2019, 2(3): 492-507.
Abstract:
The creation of Zhuzhi Ci by Chinese literati originated from the simulation of folk songs. The positioning of its poetics has undergone several evolutions in the long-term development process, from collecting folk songs to the narrative of customs and landscape, then to the record of geography and history of one place. But its trajectory has never deviated from the discourse system of Confucian poetic theory. While in the poetry of Chinese style in late Edo period of Japan, Zhuzhi Ci became a specific style of poem which takes brothel (Yuukaku in Japanese) and prostitute (Yuujyo in Japanese) as its themes. The establishment of this positioning is consistent with its Chinese original function of description of scenery, besides, the culture of brothel and literature & art of eroticism (Kousyoku in Japanese) have made a great impact on Zhuzhi Ci’s nature and appearance since modern times of Japan. Correspondingly, the creation and poetic commentary of this Zhuzhi Ci have possessed a core of culture of city resident (Tyounin in Japanese), and makes a great deviation and even conflict with the Confucian poetics. The evolution of Zhuzhi Ci is one of the concrete manifestations of the localization of Chinese style-literature in modern Japan, and shows the important role played by Japanese poetics and aesthetics in this process.
[Abstract](405) [PDF 14570KB](322)
The Flâneur in Time’s Constellation: On the Idea of Time in Walter Benjamin’s Thinking about Modernity
HU Guoping
2019, 2(3): 508-519.
Abstract:
This paper focuses on Walter Benjamin’s concept of time constellation, then discusses Benjamin’s idea of time. The foundation of Benjamin’s thinking about modernity lies in his creative interpretation of time, in which the present relates with the past in a constellation, thus destroying and reconstructing the idea of the modernity of time. In such a temporal model, history is expressed as a dialectical exchange between the past and the present. The straight line of historical time is cut off and the utopian potential of repressed memory is released. Thus it changes the present into a moment with ethical power. The flâneur is the bearer and revealer of this experience of time.
[Abstract](816) [PDF 9922KB](355)
Romanticism as Media Technologies: Friedrich Kittler on “Discourse Networks 1800”
CHE Zhixin
2019, 2(3): 520-534.
Abstract:
This paper attempts to discuss the analysis of“Discourse Networks 1800” in the first half of Kittler’s masterpiece Discourse Networks 1800/1900 by re-discovering the relationship between Romanticism and media technology, and to show how Kittler complements and corrects Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge from the perspective of media technology. Kittler creatively pointed out the metaphorical relationship between German romanticism’s knowledge structure and a production machine operating in a linear loop and explained further the paradigm shift of ideas of language around 1800, which is the shift from signifier to signified, from sign to significance, from matter to spirit. Kittler also reminded us that“poetry” accurately represented the ideas of language in this period: the language in romantic poetry is only regarded as a transparent, nonmaterial information channel.
[Abstract](573) [PDF 15522KB](292)
LIAO Ping’s Cosmological Hermeneutics on The Book of Songs and the Distinction between Ancient and Modern LiteraryMaterial Statuses
FENG Qing
2019, 2(3): 535-550.
Abstract:
LIAO Ping invents a cosmological hermeneutic on The Book of Songs during the new culture movement to fulfill his later teaching about the study of Confucian classics. However, most of his contemporaries and later generations believe that this hermeneutic goes against the orthodoxical doctrine of classical reading, or beyond the historic demand, or away from the secular practicability. Returning to the intention and interest of LIAO Ping’s later thoughts can help to reveal his inheritance of Confucian philosophy and consciousness of the crisis of Chinese civilization. LIAO Ping’s philosophical distinction between ancient and modern literary-material statuses plays an important role to illustrate the true significance of his cosmological hermeneutic for now and the future.
[Abstract](436) [PDF 18364KB](252)
Appreciating the Chinese Difference: An Interview with Roger T. Ames
Roger T. Ames, NI Linna
2019, 2(3): 553-566.
Abstract:
In an interview with LIU Yunhua and NI Linna, Roger Ames uses several examples from the Chinese philosophical canons to argue that we must strive with imagination to allow this ancient tradition to speak with its own voice, and on its own terms. There are two major problems in fully appreciating the Chinese difference, insists Ames. From a Western perspective, we are using a vocabulary inherited from the missionaries to understand Chinese philosophy, reducing it from its own status as an important contribution to world philosophy to a marginal Eastern religion. From a contemporary Chinese perspective, we must be aware that we are using the Chinese translation of Western philosophical terms invented in the second half of the nineteenth century to synchronize the Chinese language with Western modernity. A failure to be cognizant of this appropriation of Western modernity leads to a confusion between untoward claims about Chinese“transcendentalism” and“universalism” and the appropriate understanding of Confucianism as offering us common human values. The irony is that within the post-Darwinian internal critique of the Western philosophical narrative, its own strident claims about transcendentalism and universalism have been rejected broadly as a mode of fallacious thinking.
[Abstract](421) [PDF 10177KB](292)
Tie Xiao. Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China
KANG Ling
2019, 2(3): 569-571.
Abstract:
[Abstract](373) [PDF 2748KB](275)
Conceison, Claire. Meng Jinghui: I Love XXX and Other Plays
CUI Xiaoyue
2019, 2(3): 572-573.
Abstract:
[Abstract](676) [PDF 1805KB](327)
YIN Xinan. An Introduction to Indian Poetics
WANG Dongqing
2019, 2(3): 574-578.
Abstract:
[Abstract](406) [PDF 3875KB](265)
ZHU Yu. Socialism and “Nature”: A Study on the Aesthetic Debate and Literary-Artistic Practice in China, 1950s-1960s
TIAN Yan
2019, 2(3): 579-582.
Abstract:
[Abstract](391) [PDF 3165KB](316)
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