Translingual Practice: Literature National Culture and Translated Modernity-China 1900-1937

About this book

Are languages incommensurate? If so how do people establish and maintain hypothetical equivalences between words and their meanings? What does it mean to translate one culture into the language of another on the basis of commonly conceived equivalences? This studybridging contemporary theory Chinese history comparative literature and culture studiesanalyzes the historical interactions among China Japan and the West in terms of "translingual practice." By this term the author refers to the process by which new words meanings discourses and modes of representation arose circulated and acquired legitimacy in early modern China as it contacted/collided with European/Japanese languages and literatures. In reexamining the rise of modern Chinese literature in this context the book asks three central questions: How did "modernity" and "the West" become legitimized in May fourth literary discourse? What happened to native agency in this complex process of legitimation? How did the Chinese national culture imagine and interpret its own moment of unfolding?