The promise and premise of creativity : why comparative literature matters

257 Pages·2012·1.901 MB·English

by  Eoyang, Eugene Chen

The Promise
and Premise of
Creativity
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The Promise
and Premise of
Creativity
Why Comparative

Literature Matters
Eugene Eoyang

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Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Eugene Eoyang, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the permission of the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-7484-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eoyang, Eugene Chen.
The promise and premise of creativity: why comparative
literature matters / by Eugene Eoyang.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-0864-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-0864-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-8103-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-8103-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Comparative literature—Chinese and Western. 2. Comparative
literature—Western and Chinese. 3. Literature and globalization. I. Title.
PL2274.E685 2012
809’.9113—dc23
2012003058
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the United States of America
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To my mentors, colleagues, and students in
comparative literature at Indiana University

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CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Part One: Preliminaries
1 Why study literature? 3
2 “What’s the Story?”—The relevance of
literature to life 17
3 The uses of the useless: Comparative literature
and the multinational corporation 3 3
Part Two: Approaches
4 Macintosh apples and mandarin oranges:
Complexities in literary comparison 49
5 Cuentos Chinos (Chinese Tales): The new
Chinoiserie 5 7
6 Francophone Cathay: François Cheng’s
versions of the Chinese 72
7 The persistence of C athay :
China in world literature 8 4
8 A shift in cultural tectonics: The emergence
of the southern hemisphere 9 5
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viii CONTENTS
9 A cross-cultural perspective: On the modern
and the postmodern 104
10 Cultural logics: Exclusive categories vs
dialectical maodun 1 15
11 A mestizo of the mind: Maodun in the writings of
Octavio Paz 1 27
12 The conference as heuristic: Genial and congenial
comparison 138
Part Three: Prospects
13 The insights of the outsider: The legacy of
translation as afterlife 151
14 The globalization of knowledge: Interdisciplinary
and multilingual discourse 1 61
15 The glocalization of knowledge: The ends of the
world or the edge of heaven 176
16 The undisciplined discipline: Comparative
literature—creative wandering 1 92
17 Synergies and synaethesias: An intraworldly
comparative literature 2 04
Works cited 219
Index 2 27

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FOREWORD
In reviewing these essays on comparative literature for publi-
cation, what strikes me about them is how “oicotypical” they
are! “Oicotypes,” as defi ned by Carl Wilhelm von Sydow in his
Geography and Folktale Oicotypes , “denote a hereditary plant-
variety adapted to a certain milieu . . . through natural selection
amongst hereditarily dissimilar entities of the same species.” In
presenting my ideas before different audiences, instead of merely
pontifi cating on my own specialty, I have adapted my presentation
to the background of my interlocutors. When I was invited to a
conference on translation in Morocco, I realized that there would
be few if any sinologists in the audience, but there would be a pre-
ponderant majority of French speakers. So, I chose to discuss the
accuracy or inaccuracy of François Cheng’s distinctly Francophilic
renderings of Chinese poetry. “Why Study Literature?” was a
paper I presented at the invitation of Professor Lee Sang-sup, Dean
of the School of the Humanities, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea,
on October 13, 1994. It represents what I think of as a “template”
paper, that is, one in which the same analyses of literature might
be exemplifi ed by different texts for different audiences. In the fi rst
iteration, because I was addressing a Korean audience, and, in par-
ticular, an audience at Yonsei University, I used exclusively Korean
poems, in Peter Lee’s deft translations, ending with a Korean poem
by a Yonsei luminary which, as it turned out, was translated into
English by another Yonsei luminary. Since then, I have adapted the
paper for presentation at Ohio State University, Lingnan University,
and Hong Kong Baptist University. Each presentation was theoreti-
cally the same, but the examples quoted varied: American poems
offered to an Ohio audience; Hong Kong poems offered to the
Lingnan audience; and the poems offered at Hong Kong Baptist
University were those translated by HKBU colleagues. When I
attended a conference in Australia, I was particularly self-conscious
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