Books by Stuart Christie
Literature Compass (Global Circulation Project), Aug 2015
"Twenty-first Century 'Chinoiserie'". Guest editor, Stuart Christie. Literature Compass (Global C... more "Twenty-first Century 'Chinoiserie'". Guest editor, Stuart Christie. Literature Compass (Global Circulation Project). Ed. David Amigoni. Vol. 12/Issue 8 (August 2015).
Table of Contents
Christie, Stuart. 'Twenty-first Century "Chinoiserie"'
Hung, Ruth Y. Y. 'Red Nostalgia: Commemorating Mao in Our Time'
Wong, Lorraine. 'Writing China: Gu Wenda, Victor Segalen and their Steles'
Berman, Douglas. 'Chinese Ecocriticism: A Survey of the Landscape'
Huang Yu, Heidi. 'Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony in Post-Mao China'
Klein, Lucas. ' "Alors, la Chinoiserie?": The Figure of China in Theorizations of World Literature'
Gagnier, Regenia, and Lu Jiande. 'China in the 21st Century: on Borrowing, Translation, and Mixed Economies'
Twenty-first century “Chinoiserie”, the title of the present cluster of essays offered via the Global Circulation Project, offers a series of perspectives on the philology of Chinese literary studies, culture, and language using formerly unimaginable scalars of “worldedness” (Hayot), even as the nation-state, China, strives to assert the continuation of its own revolutionary project distinct from the global “market.” Presenting a forward philological practice that would rebut any reflection theory “about” China – for example, by refusing to express Chinese reality and experiences solely as a function, or form, of contemporary globalization – all of the following essays cite “China” as a potential site of critique, example, or even vitiation of the present dispensation of global capital. Achieving a degree of theoretical separation from the “market” allows China to emerge – at once discrepant of the technologies of global dissemination (such as the internet and the host of micro translational practices it encourages) as well as beholden to them, in locally rendered (“Chinese”) yet infinitely various forms. The very ubiquity of twenty-first century “Chinoiserie” presents useful challenges to conventional heuristics formerly used to encompass Chinese alterity (such as Goethe’s Weltliteratur or T. S. Eliot’s “translucency”) and also conveys the insistence of a sovereign demand: that the global appetite for Chinese language, culture, and its literary translations be rooted in the fulfillment (Erfüllung) of “China”, in all its variety, as the figure – ecological, translational, and epistemological – for our time.
Contributors: Stuart Christie (introduction); Lucas Klein; Ruth Y. Y. Hung; Douglas Scott Berman; Heidi Huang; Lorraine C. M. Wong; Regenia Gagnier and Lu Jiande.
Papers by Stuart Christie
The Review of English Studies, 2021
In an undated manuscript from the 1920s, E. M. Forster sketched out notes towards a theory he cal... more In an undated manuscript from the 1920s, E. M. Forster sketched out notes towards a theory he called ‘writing to the body with the body’, a ‘melting’ of sentiment into disinterested aesthetics, he identified as pornographic. The ‘On Pornography and Sentiment’ fragment not only reframes our understanding of Forster’s emerging stance during this period as a champion of free speech but also highlights his less well-known status as the nodal figure for a younger generation of gay writers with whom he shared drafts of his erotic short stories. My close readings of selections from Forster’s unfinished notes, his roughly contemporary work of criticism, Aspects of the Novel (1927), as well as his posthumously published short story, ‘Dr Woolacott’, suggest that Forster’s theory of sentimentalized aesthetics made the beginnings of a capable critique. By circulating his short stories, Forster sought to check mainstream censoriousness concerning ‘obscene’ texts; moreover, his ‘refunctioning’ of illicit desires to an ethical purpose enlivened the ‘phantom’ potential of the modernist public sphere (Robbins) and actively facilitated the formation of an inter-generational intimate public (Berlant).
Literature Compass, 2021
A work of digital scholarship, this essay presents the discovery of archival data obtained from u... more A work of digital scholarship, this essay presents the discovery of archival data obtained from unpublished correspondence written by American novelist Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973). Using digital tools, our project rendered and analyzed a keyword database in order to identify and measure the keyword “China” in relation to other value-laden collocations—such as country, friend, and people—which Buck promulgated widely in her role as public intellectual and China expert for her time. Buck was never able to return to China in person. Even so, the globalized values attributed to “China” in her letters remained meaningful touchstones for her philanthropy, activism, and social commentary in the United States in her lifetime, personally and professionally, as she urged greater American recognition of China's emergence prior to and during the Second World War.
The Wenshan Review, 2018
Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence, my essay documents how the transatlantic cros... more Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence, my essay documents how the transatlantic crossing of E. M. Forster's literary corpus, from a Europe devastated by war to America, challenges one of Perry Anderson's key claims about the postwar "contraflow" between the United States and England: that the sea change "modified Anglo more than American culture" (English Questions 204). Rather, the New York intellectual and literary critic, Lionel Trilling, succeeded in resituating Forster's fiction cogently in terms of exigencies recognizable to a mass American readership in wartime and after, thereby securing Forster's afterlife in the American academy. Additionally, Trilling's success imparted scale to the transatlantic turn, by making Forster's newly transformed body of work amenable to ideological re-export, back again across the Atlantic, to England. As such, the pairing offered a historically significant corrective, during the decade following Pearl Harbor, to more reactionary critical formations within literary Modernism, at a time when both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had returned to nationalist bases when endorsing literature as a vehicle for culture. I conclude by affirming that the Forster-Trilling transatlantic combination served uniquely sociohistorical, interpretively occasional, and yet critically significant scalars beyond the nationalizing function of English literature and its criticism at that time.
THE SPACE BETWEEN: LITERATURE AND CULTURE 1914-1945, 2017
This pre-print version of my article analyses data selected from declassified, public-access FBI ... more This pre-print version of my article analyses data selected from declassified, public-access FBI files on American writer Pearl S. Buck compiled before and during the Second World War. The argument establishes a crux between literary production and Cold War ideology, such that the FBI, backed by emerging technologies of surveillance, sought to create near-evidentiary “realities” out of what were merely literary tastes and ideological propensities. I call this powerful, period curtailment of literary interpretive range, in the context of the Second Red Scare, evidentiary realism. As privileged readers who constructed their own canons out of published materials, deemed acceptable or unacceptable, FBI case managers “close-read” literary materials for evidence of political subversion. Where they could not locate direct and actionable evidence of subversion in Buck's literary texts or pronouncements, case managers activated otherwise latent data by providing crucial interpretive links joining disparate signifying chains. Likewise buoyed by the ad hoc submission of data delivered along networks of enthusiastic volunteer informants nationwide, such government-backed interpretive communities, formal and informal, imposed strikingly narrow (statist) regimes of literary preference. At the same time, officials at the FBI enforced modes of censorship—alternating between the selective suppression of pertinent information and its opportune release—when delivering classified, confidential, or otherwise inaccessible information to the public.
Comparative Literature: East and West, 2017
In my essay, I document how the literary modernist critic and poet, William Empson (1906–1984), m... more In my essay, I document how the literary modernist critic and poet, William Empson (1906–1984), modeled his theoretical positions in the decades following the Second World War upon precedents found in the English Renaissance poetry of John Donne. After 1955, Empson emerged as a leading skeptic of literary “high” modernism by means of the novel analogy argued in his essay, “Donne the Space Man” (1957): namely, that literary depictions of space in Donne’s early poetry, athwart high Church doctrine, paralleled contemporary skepticism, in Empson’s own time, about interpretive orthodoxies within Eliotic criticism and among the American New Critics. With its focus upon what he calls “space travel,” Empson’s exegesis in “Donne the Space Man” (1957) pioneered what today one may call the scalar turn in literary modernist criticism. In Empson’s case, a scalar criticism endorsed Donne’s search for a more generous plurality of critical worlds and embraced cosmological scale irreducible to the more dogmatic worldview of Christian-inspired theorizations then prevailing. Re-reading the “Donne the Space Man” essay today – and when applying approaches inspired by the phenomenology of the contemporary built environment, object-oriented ontology, and unseen “lifeworlds” – allows for a more meaningful treatment of Empson’s criticism in its historical context, and when using scale as an heuristic to broaden our understandings of cosmologies, near and far, vastly different from our own.
中文摘要
本文记载了二战后的几十年中，文学现代主义评论家及诗人威廉·燕卜蓀（1906-1984）如何基于约翰·唐璜文艺复兴诗中所载先例构建自身的理论立场。1955年后，燕卜蓀通过其论文“太空人唐璜”（1957）中的新颖对比，以文学高度现代主义的怀疑者姿态出现：即尽管受到教堂教条的高压阻扰，唐璜早期诗歌中太空的文学化描写与燕卜蓀所处时代的怀疑论相似，两者都对艾略特似批评内部及美国新批评主义中的阐释正统心存疑虑。其论文“太空人唐璜”（1957）集中探讨其所谓的“太空旅行”，由此开辟了我们现今所谓的文学现代主义批评标量化转向的先锋。在燕卜蓀的讨论中，一种标量化批评支撑着唐璜寻找一种更为广阔多样化批评世界的动力，并且采用了一种宇宙标量化模式。此模式无法还原更为教条化的基督教式理论化的世界观，虽然后者在当时很流行。现今重读此文，并结合当代建筑环境现象学、以目标为导向的本体论及不可见的“生命世界”等启发下的方式，让我们得以更有意义地理解当时历史语境下燕卜蓀的批评。再者，亦可以借助标量来拓宽我们理解宇宙的探索，不管这样的世界是远还是近，是否与我们自己的相同。
Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, 2018
Thomas King: Works and Impact, 2012
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Within contemporary indigenous studies, arguments on behalf of sovereign separatism are warranted... more Within contemporary indigenous studies, arguments on behalf of sovereign separatism are warranted both legally and culturally. Sovereign autonomy is evident in legal structures and precedents established by bands and tribes first, through tradition and second, given the colonial context, as the basis for on-going survival. Despite the clarity of this indigenous-centered sovereign position, the on-going debate between scholars about the nature of indigenous sovereignty rages on-whether the latter is In more recent years, warrior/poacher relationships have had their sovereign uses, perhaps illustrating the continuing effectiveness of the policy. In Whatcom County, Washington, for example, the Lummi nation invited non-tribal volunteers to assist them in successfully convening the first pan-coastal Salish potlatch since 1937.
Literature Compass , 2010
Reappropriating Franco Moretti's term 'distant reading', this essay positions American novelist P... more Reappropriating Franco Moretti's term 'distant reading', this essay positions American novelist Pearl S. Buck as both the outsider-inside a particular Chinese cultural tradition as well as an insider-outside the tradition of Chinese fictionalized historiography (the modern xiaoshuo) which allowed for the birth of a globalized 'China' in the English-language novel. Buck's anachronistic legacy, I argue, runs afoul of Moretti's own tendency in The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture to re-inscribe the nationality and centeredness of received canons, even when attempting to legislate new directions for a global readership. Lacking a home within any particular national or global tradition, extra-canonical novels and their writers parallel the received canon subversively, by questioning the rationale underlying canon formation as a merely classificatory exercise; that is, by questioning how some works are included and others excluded. Once excluded, anachronistic novels nevertheless persist, apart from widespread scholarly recognition. Eventually, however, Pearl S. Buck's self-proclaimed anachronism, deployed so effectively during her Nobel Laureate speech in 1938, became untimely, as she struggled to convince an American television audience, in 1958, that her views about femininity, China apart, were relevant to modern life.
Comparative Literature: East and West , Oct 2010
Translation Studies, 2009
In this paper, I argue for reconsideration of the role of Native North American community transla... more In this paper, I argue for reconsideration of the role of Native North American community translators as crucial, forward enablers in the decolonizing of their sovereign language traditions. Through translation activities described as “corpus retranslation”, mother-tongue translators can meaningfully effect the reconstruction of endangered-language corpora by retranslating dominant-language works “back into” the endangered indigenous mother tongues in contexts where there are no (or few) extant written orthographies. While corpus retranslation is not without risks, it presents great potential as a pedagogical tool in emerging mother-tongue language classrooms in Native North America, where a new generation of indigenous translators is reconstituting sovereign traditions with the aid of newly crafted orthographies based on earlier salvage ethnography projects.
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Books by Stuart Christie
Table of Contents
Christie, Stuart. 'Twenty-first Century "Chinoiserie"'
Hung, Ruth Y. Y. 'Red Nostalgia: Commemorating Mao in Our Time'
Wong, Lorraine. 'Writing China: Gu Wenda, Victor Segalen and their Steles'
Berman, Douglas. 'Chinese Ecocriticism: A Survey of the Landscape'
Huang Yu, Heidi. 'Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony in Post-Mao China'
Klein, Lucas. ' "Alors, la Chinoiserie?": The Figure of China in Theorizations of World Literature'
Gagnier, Regenia, and Lu Jiande. 'China in the 21st Century: on Borrowing, Translation, and Mixed Economies'
Twenty-first century “Chinoiserie”, the title of the present cluster of essays offered via the Global Circulation Project, offers a series of perspectives on the philology of Chinese literary studies, culture, and language using formerly unimaginable scalars of “worldedness” (Hayot), even as the nation-state, China, strives to assert the continuation of its own revolutionary project distinct from the global “market.” Presenting a forward philological practice that would rebut any reflection theory “about” China – for example, by refusing to express Chinese reality and experiences solely as a function, or form, of contemporary globalization – all of the following essays cite “China” as a potential site of critique, example, or even vitiation of the present dispensation of global capital. Achieving a degree of theoretical separation from the “market” allows China to emerge – at once discrepant of the technologies of global dissemination (such as the internet and the host of micro translational practices it encourages) as well as beholden to them, in locally rendered (“Chinese”) yet infinitely various forms. The very ubiquity of twenty-first century “Chinoiserie” presents useful challenges to conventional heuristics formerly used to encompass Chinese alterity (such as Goethe’s Weltliteratur or T. S. Eliot’s “translucency”) and also conveys the insistence of a sovereign demand: that the global appetite for Chinese language, culture, and its literary translations be rooted in the fulfillment (Erfüllung) of “China”, in all its variety, as the figure – ecological, translational, and epistemological – for our time.
Contributors: Stuart Christie (introduction); Lucas Klein; Ruth Y. Y. Hung; Douglas Scott Berman; Heidi Huang; Lorraine C. M. Wong; Regenia Gagnier and Lu Jiande.
Papers by Stuart Christie
中文摘要
本文记载了二战后的几十年中，文学现代主义评论家及诗人威廉·燕卜蓀（1906-1984）如何基于约翰·唐璜文艺复兴诗中所载先例构建自身的理论立场。1955年后，燕卜蓀通过其论文“太空人唐璜”（1957）中的新颖对比，以文学高度现代主义的怀疑者姿态出现：即尽管受到教堂教条的高压阻扰，唐璜早期诗歌中太空的文学化描写与燕卜蓀所处时代的怀疑论相似，两者都对艾略特似批评内部及美国新批评主义中的阐释正统心存疑虑。其论文“太空人唐璜”（1957）集中探讨其所谓的“太空旅行”，由此开辟了我们现今所谓的文学现代主义批评标量化转向的先锋。在燕卜蓀的讨论中，一种标量化批评支撑着唐璜寻找一种更为广阔多样化批评世界的动力，并且采用了一种宇宙标量化模式。此模式无法还原更为教条化的基督教式理论化的世界观，虽然后者在当时很流行。现今重读此文，并结合当代建筑环境现象学、以目标为导向的本体论及不可见的“生命世界”等启发下的方式，让我们得以更有意义地理解当时历史语境下燕卜蓀的批评。再者，亦可以借助标量来拓宽我们理解宇宙的探索，不管这样的世界是远还是近，是否与我们自己的相同。
Table of Contents
Christie, Stuart. 'Twenty-first Century "Chinoiserie"'
Hung, Ruth Y. Y. 'Red Nostalgia: Commemorating Mao in Our Time'
Wong, Lorraine. 'Writing China: Gu Wenda, Victor Segalen and their Steles'
Berman, Douglas. 'Chinese Ecocriticism: A Survey of the Landscape'
Huang Yu, Heidi. 'Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony in Post-Mao China'
Klein, Lucas. ' "Alors, la Chinoiserie?": The Figure of China in Theorizations of World Literature'
Gagnier, Regenia, and Lu Jiande. 'China in the 21st Century: on Borrowing, Translation, and Mixed Economies'
Twenty-first century “Chinoiserie”, the title of the present cluster of essays offered via the Global Circulation Project, offers a series of perspectives on the philology of Chinese literary studies, culture, and language using formerly unimaginable scalars of “worldedness” (Hayot), even as the nation-state, China, strives to assert the continuation of its own revolutionary project distinct from the global “market.” Presenting a forward philological practice that would rebut any reflection theory “about” China – for example, by refusing to express Chinese reality and experiences solely as a function, or form, of contemporary globalization – all of the following essays cite “China” as a potential site of critique, example, or even vitiation of the present dispensation of global capital. Achieving a degree of theoretical separation from the “market” allows China to emerge – at once discrepant of the technologies of global dissemination (such as the internet and the host of micro translational practices it encourages) as well as beholden to them, in locally rendered (“Chinese”) yet infinitely various forms. The very ubiquity of twenty-first century “Chinoiserie” presents useful challenges to conventional heuristics formerly used to encompass Chinese alterity (such as Goethe’s Weltliteratur or T. S. Eliot’s “translucency”) and also conveys the insistence of a sovereign demand: that the global appetite for Chinese language, culture, and its literary translations be rooted in the fulfillment (Erfüllung) of “China”, in all its variety, as the figure – ecological, translational, and epistemological – for our time.
Contributors: Stuart Christie (introduction); Lucas Klein; Ruth Y. Y. Hung; Douglas Scott Berman; Heidi Huang; Lorraine C. M. Wong; Regenia Gagnier and Lu Jiande.
中文摘要
本文记载了二战后的几十年中，文学现代主义评论家及诗人威廉·燕卜蓀（1906-1984）如何基于约翰·唐璜文艺复兴诗中所载先例构建自身的理论立场。1955年后，燕卜蓀通过其论文“太空人唐璜”（1957）中的新颖对比，以文学高度现代主义的怀疑者姿态出现：即尽管受到教堂教条的高压阻扰，唐璜早期诗歌中太空的文学化描写与燕卜蓀所处时代的怀疑论相似，两者都对艾略特似批评内部及美国新批评主义中的阐释正统心存疑虑。其论文“太空人唐璜”（1957）集中探讨其所谓的“太空旅行”，由此开辟了我们现今所谓的文学现代主义批评标量化转向的先锋。在燕卜蓀的讨论中，一种标量化批评支撑着唐璜寻找一种更为广阔多样化批评世界的动力，并且采用了一种宇宙标量化模式。此模式无法还原更为教条化的基督教式理论化的世界观，虽然后者在当时很流行。现今重读此文，并结合当代建筑环境现象学、以目标为导向的本体论及不可见的“生命世界”等启发下的方式，让我们得以更有意义地理解当时历史语境下燕卜蓀的批评。再者，亦可以借助标量来拓宽我们理解宇宙的探索，不管这样的世界是远还是近，是否与我们自己的相同。