Sinographies Writing China Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao Table of Contents		$27.50 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-4725-5 ISBN-10 0-8166-4725-9 $82.50 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-4724-8 ISBN-10: 0-8166-4724-0
A new critical model for understanding China and its role in Western literary and political life. The essays in this thought-provoking volume investigate ideas of China and Chineseness by means of a broad range of texts, languages, and contexts that surround what the editors call the “various written Chinas” through history. Analyzing discourse of civilization, geography, ethics, ethnicity, writing, and differences about China, this work disrupts the boundaries that have previously defined this country as an object of study. Sinographies respects the power of texts to shape realities both backward and forward, to create or foreclose possibilities not only of interpretation but of experience. The essays examine topics like colonialism, literary modernism, translation, anime, and Tibet. As a whole, the volume imagines sinography as a new methodological approach to the study of China, one that clears unexpected ground for new kinds of comparative work. Contributors: Timothy Billings, Christopher Bush, Rey Chow, Danielle Glassmeyer, Timothy Kendall, Walter S. H. Lim, Lucien Miller, David Porter, Carlos Rojas, Steven J. Venturino, Henk Vynckier. Eric Hayot is associate professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. Haun Saussy is Bird White Housum Professor of comparative literature at Yale University. Steven G. Yao is associate professor of English at Hamilton College. 408 pages | 5 b&w photos | 5 7/8 x 9 | December 2007   TABLE OF CONTENTS Sinographies: An Introduction Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao Part I: The Language and Rhetoric of “China” 1. Chineseness: A Prehistory of its Future Eric Hayot 2. Reading and Difference: Image, Allegory, and the Invention of Chinese Christopher Bush 3. Impressions de Chine, Or, How to Translate from a Non-Existent Original Haun Saussy Part II: Early-Modern Cultural Production 4. Untranslation Theory: The Nestorian Stele and the Jesuit Illustration of China Timothy Billings 5. China, India, and the Empire of Commerce in Milton’s Paradise Lost Walter S. H. Lim 6. “Beyond the Bounds of Truth”: Cultural Translation and William Chambers’ Chinese Garden David Porter Part III: Testimony, Reportage, Meddling 7. Tom Dooley and the Cold War American Revision of “Indochina” Danielle Glassmeyer 8. “Torture—and loving care—in China”: Captivity & the Fiction of Oriental Despotism Timothy Kendall 9. Boundary Crossings: Fieldwork, the Hidden Self, and the Invisible Spirit Lucien Miller Part IV: Minority Discourses and Immigration 10. Museifying Formosa: George Mackay’s From Far Formosa. Henk Vynckier 11. Signifying on China: African-American Literary Theory and Tibetan Discourse Steven J. Venturino 12. Transplantation and Modernity: The Chinese/American Poems of Angel Island Steven G. Yao Part V: Mediated Externalities 13. Western Journeys of Journey to the West Carlos Rojas 14. Seminal Dispersal, Fecal Retention, and Related Narrative Matters: Eileen Chang's Tale of Roses in the Problematic of Modern Writing Rey Chow Contributors Index