| Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody Contributor(s): Chen, Shudong (Author), Ames, Roger T. (Foreword by) |
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ISBN: 149857338X ISBN-13: 9781498573382 Publisher: Lexington Books OUR PRICE: $115.83 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: October 2018 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Language Arts & Disciplines | Writing - General - Language Arts & Disciplines | Spelling & Vocabulary - Literary Criticism | Books & Reading |
| Dewey: 895.110 |
| LCCN: 2018033336 |
| Physical Information: 1.1" H x 6.3" W x 9.2" (1.36 lbs) 278 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Asian |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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 possible if 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 das Ding 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. |