Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory
This book presents contributions by thirteen scholars of Chinese and Japanese literature whose work is characterised by a strong interest in literary theory. They focus in particular on the various new theories that have emerged during the past two decades, uprooting traditional forms of understanding literary texts, their function, their readership and their interpretation. Often confined to discussion of a specific country or area, these theories have been criticised for their Western bias.
This collection breaks through these barriers, providing an opportunity for scholars of two closely related yet often independently studied cultures to present and compare their views on specific theories of literature, to discuss the advantages and shortcomings of those theories, and to consider specific difficulties related to the East-West dimension.
Contents
1. Rey Chow Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity and Lao She
2. Haruo Shirane Canon Formation in Japan: Genre, Gender, Population Culture and Nationalism
3. Haun Saussy Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté: The Surprises of Applied Structuralism
4. Hilary Chung Kristeven (Mis)understandings: Writing in the Feminine
5. Rein Raud The Heian Literary System: A Tentative Model
6. Bernhard Fuehrer Did the Master Instruct his Followers to Attack Heretics? A Note on Readings of Lunyu 2.1
7. Michel Viellard-Baron The Power of Words: Forging Fujiwara no Teika's Poetic Theory. A Philological Approach to Japanese Poetics
8. Daria Berg What the Messenger of Souls Has to Say: New Historicism and the Poetics of Chinese Culture
9. Ivo Smits Places of Meditation: Poets and Salons in Medieval Japan
Author Biography
Michel Hockx is Senior Lecturer in modern Chinese literature and language at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has published widely on modern Chinese literature. His most recent monograph is Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China (forthcoming, E J Brill: 2002).
Ivo Smits is Lecturer in Japanese literature at Leiden University. He is author of The Pursuit of Loneliness: Chinese and Japanese Nature Poetry in Medieval Japan (Franz Steiner Verlag: 1995) and the editor of Bridging the Divide: 400 Years The Netherlands-Japan (Teleac/NOT & Hotei Publishing: 2000).