Zhang Longxi

The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West

The strange taxonomy in this passage does not make any sense, and the method of its classification, if there is any method at all in this madness, This essay was presented on 31 October 1987 at the Sino-American comparative literature conference held at Princeton University and also in November 1987 at two workshops held at Indiana University and UCLA. I am thankful to the participants in the conference and workshops for their helpful comments. I would especially like to thank Professors Earl Miner, Anthony C. Yu, and Kang-i Sun Chang for their invaluable suggestions and criticisms.

Out of the Cultural Ghetto: Theory, Politics, and the Study of Chinese Literature

The past few years have witnessed the appearance of a number of controversial essays and critical responses which, when brought together and examined in a concentrated manner, may well signal a crucial moment of fundamental change in the field of Chinese literature studies in America. Judging from the polemical intensity of these essays, including the ones published in this issue of Modern China, it

Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Difference in the Comparative Study of China

Introduction 1. The myth of the other 2. Montaigne, postmodernism and cultural critique 3. Jewish and Chinese literalism 4. Out of the cultural ghetto 5. Western theory and Chinese reality 6. Postmodernism and the return of the native Notes Index.

The Complexity of Difference: Individual, Cultural, and Cross-Cultural

Abstract This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses.

East-West Comparative Studies: A Challenge and an Opportunity

I n reflecting on my own knowledge of a field of study in comparative literature, I recall an interesting experience in my teaching career some thirty years ago, when I taught a sophomore tutorial, a required undergraduate course designed to introduce to a group of American students the basic ideas of literary studies. Early in my syllabus, I asked my students to read Plato’s seventh letter, in which the philosopher argues, using “circle” as an example—circle as a name, a description, an image, a concept and, finally, as a pure idea—that everything can be divided intofive categories, ofwhich only the fifth, the pure idea, is the “actual object of knowledge which is the true reality.” The real point, however, is Plato’s dismissal of language, especially writing, as totally inadequate in expressing that true reality. “Hence no intelligent man,” he declares, “will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated, especially not into a form that is unalterable—which must be the case with what is expressed in written symbols.” Side by side with Plato, I put a passage from the Chinese book of Zhuangzi, in which the Daoist thinker also speaks of a circle (or more precisely a wheel,

Prologue: Looking Backwards at Worlds Apart

There is an old Chinese expression, huang ru ge shi or “as vague as separated by two worlds,” which is often used to describe changes so drastic that things before and after the change seem not to be able to connect, as though they belong to different life cycles. Tinged with Buddhist ideas, that phrase is of course a hyperbole, a rhetorical device to highlight an extremely high degree of change of things, people, or conditions. Sometimes when I look back at the changes that have taken place in my own life, however, that phrase does not seem to me so hyperbolic, but rather descriptive, in a way expressing a sense of surprise at the changes that have indeed been most extraordinary and unusual. This is so because, ultimately, China has in the last three decades gone through incredibly big changes, unprecedented, perhaps unimaginable even for the Chinese themselves thirty years ago. It is in this context that changes in our personal lives become intelligible. Individual lived experiences cannot be separated from the living condition of the society as a whole, but at the same time, each individual life is different and in some sense unique, following a path all its own. Did not the German poet Heinrich Heine express the idea most beautifully, with his characteristic brilliance and poetic vividness? “For every single man is a world which is born and which dies with him,” says Heine; “beneath every grave-stone lies a world’s history.”1 The changes that have occurred during the life time of my generation are unprecedented, possibly unrepeatable, but each individual tells a different story, and when I look back at my own, the sense of worlds apart well describes the feeling I have. Born in 1947 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in a family that had declined from its better days, I was the last of three siblings of my father’s second marriage, with three more brothers from his previous marriage. At the time, my father was already over sixty, and he passed away when I was only eleven years old, but he left a deep impression in my mind, for he was my first teacher and made me curious about lots of things. He often took me to tea houses and taught me how to write characters with water on the wooden table way before I reached the age for elementary school, thus giving me an early start. He came from a humble background but had some basic traditional schooling, and he moved from Xuning to Chengdu in his youth, set up his own business, and eventually became a manager in a small private bank. That was a difficult

Cross-cultural Translatability: Challenges and Prospects

In our quest of a new paradigm for cultural or cross-cultural understanding, we must first take a look at the very concept of a paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn expounded in his celebrated book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , and the related concepts of incommensurability and untranslatability. Kuhn’s concepts have a significant influence on social sciences and the humanities, and they put an overemphasis on the difference and the impossibility of communication among different groups and cultures. Such a tendency has led to the fragmentization of the social fabric and the resurgence of a most tenacious tribalism. This essay launches a critique of such concepts and argues for the possibility and validity of cross-cultural understanding, and proposes world literature as an opportunity to embrace cross-cultural translatability as the first step towards a new paradigm in the study of different cultures in our globalized world today.

Lessons from Mount Lu: China and cross-cultural understanding:

Su Shi, one of China’s greatest poets, has a simple but famous poem on viewing Mount Lu, presenting different images viewed from different perspectives. Reading this as an allegory of understanding China, this article examines the paradigmatic change of Sinology or China studies in the United States with regard to Paul Cohen’s “China-centered” approach, presents a critique of the dichotomous view of China as the reverse image of the West, and argues for the synthesis of different perspectives without privileging either the insider’s or the outsider’s view, hence the necessity to integrate Sinology with Chinese native scholarship, the desirability of a pluralistic view in cross-cultural hermeneutics.

Openness and the Dialogue of Civilizations—a Chinese Example

Dialogue and conversation fairly common in people’s daily lives, but what we are concerned about here is not the ordinary exchange of ideas and information in our daily routine, but the dialogue among civilizations that helps establish the very condition of the contemporary world in which people live their lives. The particular urgency of such dialogues can be felt as soon as we look around and take notice of the many instances of conflict, violence, and war that threaten the peace and security of our world today. Just a few recent events in different parts of the world would make it abundantly clear that humanity desperately needs dialogue in order to survive.