Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China Review

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Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China ReviewZhang Longxi, formerly of UC-Riverside and now teaching at City University of Hong Kong, makes a supremely scholarly effort to bridge the yawning cultural gap between what many Western literary theorists imagine to be the contemporary condition of Chinese literary studies and what is in reality the case. In this collection of six previously published but edited essays, Professor Zhang brings the proverbial mirror closer to those who gaze on China with the distorting bifocals of binarism. While readily acknowledging that there are indeed important differences in philosophical outlook and historical experiences East and West and that these differences often distort the lenses of Western literary imaging, Zhang argues against making to much of this dichotomy, these mighty opposites.
Zhang is passionately devoted to opening an essentially Chinese path through the thicket of literary interpretation--a path that can borrow and appropriate theory from the West when needed but is not directed by a Western (re: Orientalist) compass. He imagines for Chinese literary scholarship a reclamation of the modern terrain so hard-won by Lu Xun and secured by Liu Zaifu and others. While its intellectual boundaries are as of yet to be ascertained, its direction is certain: away from wholesale investment in the latest Western theoretical project.
In his excellent essay, "Western Theory and Chinese Reality," Zhang sets about to critique critical theory itself, that meta-narrative that until now has been above reproach in the Left-laden academy which embraces it. In so doing, he makes well-reasoned forays into cross-cultural literary analysis (having lived and taught in both the West and mainland China) to reclaim Chinese space to question the merits of those like Prof. Rey Chow who appropriate Chinese-constructed symbolism for their own narrow ideological agendas. He reconstructs those who deconstruct without sufficient sympathy for or awareness of pressing Chinese political realities, aptly suggesting that their misplaced literary analysis ironically amounts to little more than neo-colonialism. In the process, here as elsewhere in these essays, he resituates Said and the latter's sense of postcolonial theory from a refreshingly Third World perspective.
In the next essay,"Postmodernism and the Return of the Native" he pummels the po-mo position on the absolute relativism of historical narrative (a topic which he takes up again in subsequent journal writing), among other matters of concern. And he revisits Said, arguing rather effectively that much in Western literary theorizing has unwittingly become a colonialist imposition on China.
That rare work of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary inquiry that deserves careful reading, Zhang's collection is bound to become a seminal text in the field of comparative literary analysis.Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China Overview

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