Haun Saussy

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Chicago

Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn foregrounds characteristics of plastics that in his view define the modern sensibility—in particular, mutability (plasticity), agglomeration, and the resistance of polymer bonds to breaking down. After exploring interrelated aspects of these three features, the article focuses on plasticity taken alone as the conditi...

Le couple de termes théoriques langue et parole ressort de la critique que faisait Ferdinand de Saussure de la recherche sur le langage pratiqué de son temps. La parole y figure en creux : son attribut principal, c’est de ne pas être la langue (structure collective, stable, psychologique). Si l’on cherche des antécédents historiques à l’étude de la...

The engagement of scholars and social scientists with cultures not their own is often said today to be a colonial or appropriative action. Such charges are countered here not defensively but by description of the hybridity of intercultural dialogues, of which translation is one case. Jesuit translation in Ming-dynasty China gives the example. Trans...

Exile or banishment has long been a professional liability of intellectuals in many cultures. For practical consequences, it matters whether an offender is exiled to another polity, becoming subject to its laws, or banished to a marginal area of a single world empire. Within the Roman and Chinese Empires, banished poets narrate their predicament in...

The extension of World Literature, a profoundly valuable concept, implies a degree of homogeneity among its objects which undermines the promise of this disciplinary field. Enlarging the scope of World Literature to include the vast corpus of Chinese writing only raises the stakes, for this corpus is internally heterogeneous, temporally differentia...

This chapter examines translated foreign poetry and song texts in premodern China. The Collected Discussions in the White Tiger Hall , compiled after 79 CE, include a discussion of the virtues of music, framed as a counterpart to ritual. Through the logic of serial redefinition and repeated parallelism characteristic of Warring States and Han syste...

This chapter discusses the practice of translation in China. In China, the translation of foreign works arises simultaneously with the project of a modern literature, and so the study of translation tends to become identified with the study of this literature. The turn toward the foreign was motivated by a feeling of lack, exhaustion, and defeat, a...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Chinese literature, explaining the hypothetical “ninefold translation,” which is a bucket-brigade scenario of international communication. If the great achievement of the unified Chinese empire is the imposition of a single set of rules, foreign cultures are a proliferation of endless unregulated an...

This concluding chapter highlights the importance of comparative study in tracing the spatial and temporal boundaries of Chinese civilization. Like any universalizing civilization, Chinese civilization is reluctant to define its limits from the inside. Contact with incomprehensible languages, unrecognizable letters, unacceptable customs, and disloy...

This chapter evaluates the wider set of relationships between Chinese texts and foreign publics, explaining that the “Chinese-character sphere” or hanzi wenhua quan has many different kinds of borders, internal and external. One kind of border is semantic. Within China, one stumbles on nonsense words and names, relics of lost languages that have be...

This chapter focuses on the writing of history in China. People who are aware of the multicultural character of China often write the history of China in the mode of comedy, of reconciliation. At the outset of the story, there are differences and conflicts, but in the end the differences are resolved into a unity or harmony and everyone is better o...

Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China. The book offers an account of world literature in which China, as center, produces its own margins. The book investigates the meanings of literary translation...

This chapter addresses how participants in Chinese high culture made contact with the cultures of surrounding peoples through exile. The court used its powers of nomination to remove a troublesome official or the leader of a quarreling faction from the capital. In so doing, at the same time it continued the consolidation of its control in the borde...

The article explores the interface between literature and ideas by highlighting a core »literary« idea, the notion of the text itself. All »text-immanent« interpretation reposes, after all, on the work of editors. Recent debates in textual editing are reviewed to demonstrate how difficult – or for some, how undesirable – it is to fix the identity o...

War and Literary Studies poses two main questions: First, how has war shaped the field of literary studies? And second, when scholars today study the literature of war what are the key concepts in play? Seeking to complement the extant scholarship, this volume adopts a wider and more systematic approach as it directs our attention to the relation b...

Creative storytelling is the beating heart of Darwin's science. All of Darwin's writings drew on information gleaned from a worldwide network of scientific research and correspondence, but they hinge on moments in which Darwin asks his reader to imagine how specific patterns came to be over time, spinning yarns filled with protagonists and antagoni...

What is involved in framing a counterfactual? Let’s say I have a daydream about living in Shakespeare’s time. Who would I be and what would I do? Well, I’d go to the Globe, that much I know for sure, and bring a notebook. Of course, it is impossible for me to have lived in Shakespeare’s time, for the “me” that is having this revery is the result of...

One of the great fascinations of excavated Chinese texts is the promise of recovering the formative stage of works that later became classics: we might then learn what later editors and interpreters have done to them, and rewrite the intellectual history of early China. But little is inevitable in the history of texts. This paper takes a single sho...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, pol...

Plato’s characterization of speech genres insists that lyric poetry must be uttered by the poet speaking as him- or herself, a demand often occurring in the history of poetic theories around the world. The grammatical person of the speaker is easily confused or hijacked, however, as accounts of fictionality or insincerity remind us. Widespread soci...

Nineteenth-century origin stories about culture and poetry assume a pattern of development and diversification from a single starting point—be that a primitive language or a single ethnic community. But according to twentieth-century models, the development of culture depends on the clash of different patterns of activity that disrupt the forward m...

This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, and lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism’s most important, most vested, and perhaps least well-defined or definable terms. Rhythm in these essays is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. It is a key term through which Romantic,...

Description of the four-line poetic genre of jueju, for a special number on short forms (NLH, 2019).

“World literature,” one of the growth fields in contemporary comparative literature, often begs the question of the “world” it reflects. Here it is suggested that East Asia from around 400 BCE to 1800 CE constituted a domain of circulation of literary, religious and philosophical texts that can well be taken as a “world.” Consequences for the futur...

The standard definition of translation as the rendering, in one language, of content originally formulated in another language is insufficient to describe some situations that closely approximate translation and sometimes attend it. When the translated texts result from a chain of sequential rewritings, only some early phases of which had any conte...

McComas Taylor's Seven Days of Nectar offers a contrastive description of three seven‐day performances of the traditional Sanskrit text Bhāgavatapurāna in different locations and with different sponsorship, bringing out the special characteristics of each as a variant of living textual practice. The book also contains reports of interviews with rec...

A tenacious tradition considers the lyric as the manifestation of a subjectivity, whether personal or universal. But folk traditions as well as the twentieth-century avant-gardes offer the counter-example of poetry that arises from the collocation of verbal fragments, of artificial languages, of subjects in name only, and dare to present these as a...

Liu Dong, currently professor of philosophy in Tsinghua University and vice dean of Tsinghua’s Academy of Traditional Chinese Learning (Guoxue yuan), was born in 1955. Blocked from higher education during the Cultural Revolution, he worked in an iron-smelting factory until he was permitted to enroll in philosophy at Nanjing University. He took his...

Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the "device"-core ideas of modern literary theory-were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant...

Oral literature perturbs the institutions of literary study. A too emphatic distinction between oral and written cultures is an artefact of cultural and technological difference and must be situated within the history of writing and other media. Before we can understand what “oral literature” is, a history of the concept “oral literature” is needed...

Theorists of oral literature often defend the genre against the charge of being a “mechanical” aggregate of ready-made phrases. But mechanism, far from being a drawback, is an advantage in a genre that requires frequent reproduction by memory. An investigation of recent oral traditions shows the degree to which composition is free and constrained;...

Jean Paulhan’s description of “hain-teny,” a form of poetic joust carried out with proverbs by the Merinas of Madagascar, stimulated ethnographers and literary theorists of the early twentieth century to elaborate models of a modular, iterable style of folk poetic composition. As Paulhan’s account of this folk genre was taken up by Granet, Jousse,...

We think of writing as producing a “word-for-word” account of speech. But this precision is entirely relative and needs to be situated alongside media that seek to reproduce the intonation and speed of speech (phonography), and the particular inflections of sound and non-standard vocabulary (dialect transcription). The first devices for recording t...

The “Modernism” controversy of the early 1900s pitted philological scholarship against the authority of the Roman Catholic church. Some Catholic thinkers dreamt of a superior form of writing that would bypass the philologists’ demonstrations of inconsistency and contradiction in the Bible. One such strategy was Marcel Jousse’s claim that the Gospel...

Orality is generally consigned to the doorstep in histories of media: the prelude to the “extensions of man” but not one of the extensions itself. Memory in a culture that has not adopted writing must be described more carefully as a form of writing on other human minds. Studies of folk literature converge with studies of memory to suggest the prop...

“Who speaks?” Core ideas of modern literary theory—the author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”—were pioneered in the reflection on oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts—...

Lo que Borges le enseñó a Cervantes engloba tanto los debates y cambios teóricos recientes en literatura comparada, como su aplicación práctica. El libro analiza también la disciplina en el contexto de la globalización, y en su análisis no deja de lado la comparación con otras artes y medios audiovisuales como el cine. Repleto de ejemplos de la li...

Predictions of an age of “secondary orality,” brought on by the diffusion of electronic media, are characteristic of the 1960's version of technological globalization, but draw on earlier accounts of orality as the primordial human communications medium. In these accounts, writing, as the technology of technologies, is imagined as a finite episode...

'Translation' is one of our all-purpose metaphors for almost any kind of mediation or connection: we ask of a principle how it 'translates' into practice, we announce initiatives to 'translate' the genome into predictions, and so forth. But the metaphor of translation-of the discovery of equivalents and their mutual substitution-so attracts our att...

Introducing Comparative Literature is a comprehensive guide to the field offering clear, concise information alongside useful analysis and examples. It frames the introduction within recent theoretical debates and shifts in the discipline whilst also addressing the history of the field and its practical application. Looking at Comparative Literatur...

Readers of the Zhuangzi have seen many attempts to work out the “philosophy” or the “teaching” of its author, either by privileging certain sections and deriving from them an interpretation of the others, or by trying to differentiate the original Zhuangzi from the additions that have accompanied it since antiquity, or by dividing its authorship am...

The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition. By LiZehou, translated by Maija BellSamei. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010. xix, 257 pp. $50.00 (cloth). - Volume 72 Issue 3 - Haun Saussy