Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody
Regular price
€102.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Shudong Chen
A23=Roger T. Ames
aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Asian literature
Author_Shudong Chen
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=CBV
Category=CJBG
Category=CJCW
Category=DS
Category=DSA
Chinese literature
Chinese prosody
Comparative literature
comparative philosophy
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
function words
Language_English
museum effect
PA=Available
poetics
Price_€50 to €100
prosody
PS=Active
softlaunch
symphonic tapestry
synaesthesia
visual onomatopoeia
Product details
- ISBN 9781498573382
- Weight: 581g
- Dimensions: 159 x 231mm
- Publication Date: 31 Oct 2018
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In the light of Chinese prosody and various mutually illuminating major cases from the original English, Chinese, French, Japanese and German classical literary texts, the book explores the possibility of discovering “a road not taken” within the road well-trodden in literature. In an approach of “what Wittgenstein calls criss-crossing,” this monographic study, the first ever of this nature, as Roger T. Ames points out in the Foreword, also emphasizes a pivotal “recognition that these Chinese values [revealed in the book] are immediately relevant to the Western narrative as well”; the book demonstrates, in other words, how such a “criss-crossing” approach would be unequivocally possible as long as our critical attention be adequately turned to or pivoted upon the “trivial” matters, a posteriori, in accordance with the live syntactic-prosodic context, such as pauses, stresses, phonemes, function words, or the at once text-enlivened and text-enlivening ambiguity of “parts of speech,” which often vary or alter simultaneously according to and against any definitive definition or set category a priori. This issue pertains to any literary text across cultures because no literary text would ever be possibleif it were not, for instance, literally enlivened by the otherwise overlooked “meaningless” function words or phonemes; the texts simultaneously also enliven these “meaningless” elements and often turn them surreptitiously into sometimes serendipitously meaningful and beautiful sea-change-effecting “les mots justes.” Through the immeasurable and yet often imperceptible influences of these exactly “right words,” our literary texts, such as a poem, could thus not simply “be” but subtly “mean” as if by mere means of its simple, rich, and naturally worded being, truly a special “word picture” of dasDing an sich. Describable metaphorically as “museum effect” and “symphonic tapestry,” a special synaesthetic impact could also likely result from such les-mots-justes-facilitated subtle and yet phenomenal sea changes in the texts.
Shudong Chen is professor of humanities at Johnson County Community College.
