Table Of ContentCross-cultural Studies: China and the World
East Asian Comparative
Literature and Culture
Edited by
Zhang Longxi (City University of Hong Kong)
Wiebke Denecke (Boston University)
Editorial Board
Alexander Beecroft (University of South Carolina)
Ronald Egan (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Joshua Fogel (York University, Canada)
Alexa Huang (George Washington University)
Peter Kornicki (Cambridge University, UK)
Karen Thornber (Harvard University)
Rudolf Wagner (Heidelberg University, Germany)
VOLUME 6
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/eacl
Cross-cultural Studies:
China and the World
A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Zhang Longxi
Edited by
Qian Suoqiao
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword vii
Contributors x
Introduction: Qian Zhongshu, Zhang Longxi and Modern Chinese
Scholarship 1
Qian Suoqiao
Prologue: Looking Backwards at Worlds Apart 13
Zhang Longxi
Part 1
Sinological Studies: China and Her “Others” in History
1 A Han Official Serves the Jurchen: Zhao Bingwen’s Poetic Reflections on
Rival States and Cultures 25
Ronald Egan
2 Dwelling in the Texts: Toward an Ethnopoetics of Zhu Xi
and Daoxue 49
Lionel M. Jensen
3 Some Thoughts on Writing the History of Chinese Thought 91
Torbjörn Lodén
4 China and Japan: Dichotomies and Diglossia in Japanese
Literary History 109
Gunilla Lindberg-Wada
Part 2
Comparative Cultural Studies: East and West
5 Antiquarianism in China and Europe: Reflections on
Momigliano 127
Lothar von Falkenhausen
vi Contents
6 Cosmology, Divination and Semiotics: Chinese and Greek 152
Lisa Raphals
7 Matteo Ricci the Daoist 176
Haun Saussy
8 “That roar which lies on the other side of silence”: Comparing
Hong lou meng, Middlemarch, and other Masterpieces
of Western Narrative 194
Donald Stone
Part 3
Cultural Theory: China and the World
9 Zhang Longxi’s Contribution to World Literature in the Globalizing
World of Multiculturalism: A Tribute 209
Hwa Yol Jung
10 To Honor the Language of Truth: Reflections on Friedrich Nietzsche,
Hayim Nachman Bialik, Chen Yinke and Zhang Longxi 240
Vera Schwarcz
11 Mao’s China Abroad, and Its Homecoming: A Comedy of
Cross-culturing in Two Acts 259
Guo Jian
12 Memory, Rhizome and Postmodern Sensitivity: Wong Kar-wai and
Brazilian Films 280
Denize Correa Araujo
Epilogue
The Saintly and the Suborned 298
Timothy Mo
Chinese Character List 319
Bibliography 324
Series Editors’ Foreword
East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture
East Asia is reaching into the world. The number of Chinese students and
scholars studying at foreign universities has never been larger, the “Korean
wave” washes K-dramas and K-pop ashore all continents, and Japanese manga
and anime garner millions of young fans in New Delhi and Cape Town, Oslo
and Vladivostok, New York and Rome. Popular culture proves a powerful
medium to connect East Asian countries to the world, but also to each other,
softening the divisions that the twentieth century has brought to this region.
Much of what a good century ago connected the East Asian “Sinographic
Sphere” of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—cultures that traditionally
relied on the Chinese script and literary language—has disappeared. East
Asians around the year 1900 still communicated through the authoritative
lingua franca of Literary Chinese. For almost two millennia “Chinese-style
writing” had been the language of government, scholarship, Buddhism, and
belles-lettres: Under China’s hegemony many states adopted Chinese culture
and its script during the first millennium ce. During the second millennium
Japan, Vietnam, and Korea developed phonographic scripts that led to the
gradual abandonment of Chinese characters in Korea and Vietnam and the
blossoming of local vernacular literatures. In the early twentieth century
reformers inspired by Western ideas of “nation states” and “national languages”
spearheaded vernacular movements that swept Chinese-style writing and the
intellectual and literary culture that went with it aside.
The death of Literary Chinese as East Asia’s venerable literary language over
the past century and its replacement with the English language and Western
culture marks an irreversible and little noticed inflection point in the history
of humanity: the disappearance of the world’s last cultural sphere where a
strongly “logographic” script (recording meaning of “words” rather than
“sounds” as “phonographic” alphabets do) had enabled distinctive literary cul-
tures to thrive for almost two millennia. The world history of writing starts
with strongly logographic writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mesopo-
tamian cuneiform, Chinese characters and Mesoamerican glyphs. Phono-
graphic scripts have long since replaced all but Chinese characters. Thanks to
the logographic writing system East Asia’s “bi-literacy”—textual production in
Literary Chinese and local vernaculars—functioned quite differently from
alphabetic lingua francas. Europe’s bilingualism during the Medieval Period
was rooted in Latin, both spoken and read. In contrast, Chinese characters
allowed East Asians (including speakers of Chinese dialects) to pronounce any
given text in Literary Chinese in their local vernacular language.
viii Series Editors’ Foreword
Thus East Asia shared a “grapholect,” or scripta franca, as we should call it
more appropriately. In the absence of a common spoken language, people
could communicate in “brush talk,” conversing by passing paper back and
forth. Around the year 1900 East Asian elites were still part of a shared world of
transnational education and Bildung through intensive training in the Chinese
Classics or a Chinese-style civil service examination system that brought elites
in Hanoi and Seoul closer to each other than they were to their fellow peasant
countrymen living in a village just outside the capital. The last Chinese-style
civil service examinations were held in Vietnam in 1919 under the French colo-
nial government, fourteen years after the abolishment of the examination
system in China herself.
The painful history of wars and colonial exploitation in the twentieth cen-
tury has added yet more visceral divisions and, more recently, economic and
military competition have done little to mend rifts. Rather they add to the
global stream of daily news that define East Asia, negatively, as a region that
fights over history text books and the naming of war events as “massacres” or
“incidents,” struggles over appropriate ways to honor the war dead, and quib-
bles over uninhabited islands. Because national ideologies have come to define
East Asia over the past century, the death of East Asia’s biliteracy and the
shared culture it afforded have gone largely unlamented.
But the awareness of this common heritage is not just of academic rele-
vance or nostalgic interest. Rather, bringing the rich histories of shared and
contested legacies back into collective memory within East Asia and into pub-
lic consciousness throughout the world, while not erasing all the complicated
political and ideological issues generated by recent history, will contribute to
the creation of a positive transnational identity where Japanese or Koreans
will hopefully one day proudly call themselves “East Asians,” just as most
French and Germans have overcome their war wounds and both would call
themselves “Europeans” today.
This is the most ambitious goal of Brill’s new book series East Asian
Comparative Literature and Culture. The book series responds to a swiftly grow-
ing need as educational curricula, research agendas, and journalistic writing
aim for an ever more inclusive global scope. With the increasing international
importance of East Asia in economic, political, and cultural terms, more and
more scholars and general readers are seeking a better grasp of this part of the
world which can boast long-standing histories and traditions as well as vibrat-
ing modern cultures.
East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture responds to the need for a
deeper understanding and appreciation of this region by publishing substan-
tial comparative research on the literary and cultural traditions of East Asia
Series Editors’ Foreword ix
and their relation to the world. We showcase original research on the method-
ology and practice of comparison, including intra-East Asian comparisons of
China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam; East-West comparisons that examine
Western alongside East Asian traditions; and comparative studies that exam-
ine East Asian literatures and cultures in the light of their relations with India,
the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America. The series focuses on interpretive
sciences, that is, the core Humanities of literature, history, religion, philosophy
and thought, art history, but also welcomes contributions adopting culturally-
informed approaches in archeology, historical geography, anthropology, politi-
cal science, sociology, or linguistics. It befits our historical moment well to
make sure that we as scholars combine comparative analysis with the depth of
area-study-expertise and philology, theoretical acumen, and a courageous ori-
entation towards the exploration of fundamental questions. This is the tall
order that this book series and its authors are taking on. We are confident,
however, that the book series we put forward in response to the rapidly grow-
ing interest in the entire East Asian region will make significant contributions
to scholarship and mutual understanding and successfully integrate knowl-
edge about and approaches to different literary and cultural traditions through
critical examination in comparison.
Wiebke Denecke
Zhang Longxi
Contributors
Zhang Longxi
張隆溪
holds an ma in English from Peking University and a Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He had taught at Peking,
Harvard, and the University of California, Riverside, before moving to Hong
Kong in 1998, and he is currently Chair Professor of Comparative Literature
and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. He is an elected foreign
member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, a
foreign member of Academia Europaea, a member of the Executive Council
of the International Comparative Literature Association (icla), and an
Advisory Editor of New Literary History (usa). He has published widely
in both English and Chinese, and his major book publications include:
《二十世紀西方文論述評》
(A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century
Theories of Literature) (Joint Publishing Co., 1986), The Tao and the Logos:
Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Duke University Press, 1992), Mighty
Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China
《走出文化的封閉圈》
(Stanford University Press, 1998), (Out of the
Cultural Ghetto) (Commercial Press, 2000; 2nd ed. Joint Publishing Co.,
2004), Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell
《中西文化研究十論》
University Press, 2005), (Ten Essays in Chinese-
Western Cross-Cultural Studies) (Fudan University Press, 2005, 2010),
Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (University of Toronto Press,
《比較文學研究入門》
2007), (An Introduction to Comparative Literature)
《靈魂的史詩﹕失樂園》
(Fudan University Press, 2009), (A Spiritual
《一轂集》
Epic: Paradise Lost) (Taipei: Net and Books, 2010),
(Collection of Thirty Essays) (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2011),
《文學、歷史、思想﹕中西比較研究》
(Literature—History—Thought:
Chinese Western Comparative Studies) (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co. Ltd.,
《從比較文學到世界文學》
2012), (From Comparative Literature to World
Literature) (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2012), From Comparison to
World Literature (SUNY, 2015) as well as an edited volume The Concept of
Humanity in an Age of Globalization (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2012).
Denize Correa Araujo
received her PhD in Comparative Literature, Cinema and Arts at University of
California, Riverside, usa in 1998. She is Professor of Film Studies at the
Master and Doctorate in Communication and Languages, and Coordinator of
the Post-Graduate Studies in Cinema at the Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná,
