Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China / Haun Saussy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Saussy, Haun, author.

Series:

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 212.

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 212

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Civilization.

China--Civilization.

China.

China--Historiography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

Leiden; Boston : BRILL, 2001.

Place of Publication:

Boston : Harvard University Asia Center, 2001.

Summary:

"China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject"--these and other dualisms furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof. But what does this language of essential difference accomplish? The essays in this book are an attempt to cut short the recitation of differences and to answer this question. In six interpretive studies of China, the author examines the ways in which the networks of assumption and consensus that make communication possible within a discipline affect collective thinking about the object of study. Among other subjects, these essays offer a historical and historiographical introduction to the problem of comparison and deal with translation, religious proselytization, semiotics, linguistics, cultural bilingualism, writing systems, the career of postmodernism in China, and the role of China as an imaginary model for postmodernity in the West. Against the reigning simplifications, these essays seek to restore the interpretation of China to the complexity and impurity of the historical situations in which it is always caught. The chief goal of the essays in this book is not to expose errors in interpreting China but to use these misunderstandings as a basis for devising better methodologies for comparative studies.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Group Tours and Swimming with Schools

In the Workshop of Equivalences: Translation, Institutions, and Media in the Jesuit Re-formation of China

The Prestige of Writing: Wen, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography

Always Multiple Translation: Or, How the Chinese Language Lost Its Grammar

No Time Like the Present: The Category of Contemporaneity in Chinese Studies

Postmodernism in China: A Sketch and Some Queries

Outside the Parenthesis (Those People Were a Kind of Solution)

The Difficult Inch

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Harvard East Asian Monographs.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781684173723

1684173728

OCLC:

604764214

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9781684173723 DOI