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The Global Travels of Judge Dee
In the post-war mid-century Robert van Gulik produced a series of stories set in Imperial China and featuring a Chinese Judge: Judge Dee. This book examines the author’s unprecedented effort in hybridising two heterogenous crime writing traditions – traditional Chinese gong’an (court-case) fiction and its Anglo-American counterpart – bringing to light how his fiction draws elements from these two traditions for plots, narrative features, visual images, and gender representation.
Relying on research on various sources and literary traditions, it provides illumination of the historical contexts, centring on the cultural interaction and connectedness that occurred during the multidirectional global flows of the Judge Dee texts in both western and Chinese markets. This study contributes to current scholarship on crime fiction by questioning its predominantly Eurocentric focus and the divisive post-colonial approach often adopted in accessing works concerning foreign peoples and cultures.
Relying on research on various sources and literary traditions, it provides illumination of the historical contexts, centring on the cultural interaction and connectedness that occurred during the multidirectional global flows of the Judge Dee texts in both western and Chinese markets. This study contributes to current scholarship on crime fiction by questioning its predominantly Eurocentric focus and the divisive post-colonial approach often adopted in accessing works concerning foreign peoples and cultures.
The Global Travels of Judge Dee
In the post-war mid-century Robert van Gulik produced a series of stories set in Imperial China and featuring a Chinese Judge: Judge Dee. This book examines the author’s unprecedented effort in hybridising two heterogenous crime writing traditions – traditional Chinese gong’an (court-case) fiction and its Anglo-American counterpart – bringing to light how his fiction draws elements from these two traditions for plots, narrative features, visual images, and gender representation.
Relying on research on various sources and literary traditions, it provides illumination of the historical contexts, centring on the cultural interaction and connectedness that occurred during the multidirectional global flows of the Judge Dee texts in both western and Chinese markets. This study contributes to current scholarship on crime fiction by questioning its predominantly Eurocentric focus and the divisive post-colonial approach often adopted in accessing works concerning foreign peoples and cultures.
Relying on research on various sources and literary traditions, it provides illumination of the historical contexts, centring on the cultural interaction and connectedness that occurred during the multidirectional global flows of the Judge Dee texts in both western and Chinese markets. This study contributes to current scholarship on crime fiction by questioning its predominantly Eurocentric focus and the divisive post-colonial approach often adopted in accessing works concerning foreign peoples and cultures.
Proceedings of the 22nd Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association
The 2019 congress of the International Comparative Literature Association attracted many hundreds of scholars from all around the world to Macau. This volume contains a modest selection of papers to discuss the four hottest fields of the discipline: the future of comparison, the position of national and diaspora literature in the context of globalization, the importance of translation, and the concepts of world literature. The contributions cover huge geographical and cultural areas, but pay special attention to the connections between Western (both American and European) and Asian (especially Indian and East-Asian) literatures. The literatures of the world might be different but they are also connected.
Proceedings of the 22nd Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association
The 2019 congress of the International Comparative Literature Association attracted many hundreds of scholars from all around the world to Macau. This volume contains a modest selection of papers to discuss the four hottest fields of the discipline: the future of comparison, the position of national and diaspora literature in the context of globalization, the importance of translation, and the concepts of world literature. The contributions cover huge geographical and cultural areas, but pay special attention to the connections between Western (both American and European) and Asian (especially Indian and East-Asian) literatures. The literatures of the world might be different but they are also connected.
Reading Sheldon Pollock from the Sinographic Cosmopolis
Volume Editor:
Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wake-up call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume.
Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.
Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.
Reading Sheldon Pollock from the Sinographic Cosmopolis
Volume Editor:
Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wake-up call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume.
Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.
Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.
Abstract
This introductory chapter seeks to contextualize Sheldon Pollock’s seminal ideas about “cosmopolitan and vernacular” in history in a comparative global perspective that goes beyond just traditional East Asian literary cultures. To that end, it begins with a discussion of some of the pesky yet important terminological questions relevant to studying the language, writing, and literary culture in traditional “East Asia,” and argues against certain features of “sphere-speak” and “Sino-speak” (especially the term “Sinosphere”) before taking up working definitions of “cosmopolis,” “vernacular,” and offering a defense of the term “Sinographic Cosmopolis” as against just “Sinographic Sphere.” The remainder of the chapter attempts a comprehensive survey of the reception of Sheldon Pollock’s ideas across a variety of translocal cultures, beginning with South (and Southeast) and the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ that he famously christened, before moving on to Latinitas, the Persianate Cosmopolis, and the Babylonian Cosmopolis, all by way of prefacing an overview and critique of recent work on the histories of vernacularization and comparative literary culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of recent research in comparative and world literature that engages with Sheldon Pollock’s work and also provides brief synopses of the other chapters in the volume.
Abstract
This article examines an early-twentieth-century attempt to create a non-Latin phonographic script for the Vietnamese language. This alternative writing system, called “New Characters for the Nation’s Sounds,” or Quốc Âm Tân Tự, was created in rejection of the two major forms of written Vietnamese current in the early twentieth century: the Latin-based alphabet known as Quốc Ngữ, and the Sinograph-based morphosyllabary known as Chữ Nôm. I argue that the author of this alternative script was motivated by fears that participation in a broader cosmopolitan system would obliterate the Vietnamese language, and its perceived connection to a cosmological order first articulated by the classical East Asian sages. The mechanics of the script reveal the author’s hopes for the Vietnamese language as a repository for Vietnamese culture, while its preface expresses the fears that motivated the author to create it. The entire text thus provides a snapshot for the language ethics of late colonial Vietnam, as intellectuals wrestled with what they hoped Western civilization might teach them, alongside what they feared it might destroy.
Abstract
This chapter explores the relationship between official historical works and popular works of historical fiction produced in the early Edo period. It examines passages from the biographical text Toyotomi Hideyoshi fu
Abstract
This chapter examines the range of cultural practices arising from the gap between Literary Sinitic and the Korean language and script—the cosmopolitan and the vernacular—beginning with the invention of the Korean alphabet in the fifteenth century and concluding with the demise of the Sinographic Cosmopolis in the twentieth century. The writing system of han’gŭl is theorized not as a form of discrete vernacularization or a tool for teaching or controlling the people, but rather as a technology-cum-strategy for controlling the relations between China and Chosŏn, Sinicization and de-Sinicization, the king and his people, and among the people themselves. At the turn of the twentieth century and into the Japanese colonial period, this writing technology aided in aurally mediating the relationship between the Latin Cosmopolis and Sinographic Cosmopolis, as bilingual dictionaries published by Western missionaries for the first time began to establish a relationship of translational equivalence between Western languages and Sino-Korean terminology. The Sinographic Cosmopolis, based in Korea on a relationship between vernacular Korean and Literary Sinitic, thus morphed into a Sinographic Mediapolis, centered on the current and potentially future cosmopolitan languages of the Latin Cosmopolis and Japanese and Korean incorporating indigenized Sino-Korean vocabulary via Japanese and sinographs as remnants of the cosmopolis. As Japan extended direct control over the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese language began to dominate the relationship between the vernacular and the cosmopolis through translation and inscriptional style (munch’e
Abstract
Departing from the observation that teleological narratives about a unilinear development of ever more “nation”-oriented language theories and linguistic practice in Chosŏn Korea do not necessarily hold, the present chapter probes into the language ideology of Pak Chiwŏn
Abstract
Since the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Koreans have been able to achieve a certain congruity between speech and writing. By contrast, for more than a millennium before the creation of the Korean alphabet, and even for centuries thereafter, people used one of a variety of vernacular Korean dialects in their everyday speech, while for inscription, government organs and the elite class adopted sinography when writing either in orthodox Literary Sinitic or in borrowed-graph inscription. Until the late nineteenth century, Korean linguistic life was characterized by this complex mix of spoken language vs. multiple inscriptional practices, which stimulated debate on the question of the discrepancy between speech and writing. Already prior to the late nineteenth-century debates, however, discussions of Korea’s complex language situation and suggestions for reforms figured prominently in discussions among the literati class about intellectual and practical desiderata from the seventeenth century onward. Yet, in sharp contrast to the great wealth of studies of the ideas and activities surrounding language reform introduced after the modern Kabo Reforms of 1894, pre-1894 language-reform debates and proposals have received only scant scholarly attention. This paper aims to supplement the history of Korean debate on language reform, including the question of the unity of speech and writing (so-called ŏnmun ilch’i
Abstract
This chapter foregrounds lexical vernacularity, or vernacular writing at the level of words and expressions, to reconsider the history of vernacularization in Korea and the boundaries of Korean vernacular literature. It focuses on the lexical texture of a late eighteenth-century collection of tales from Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) entitled Tongp’ae naksong (Repeatedly Recited Stories of the East), a collection of tales compiled by No Myŏnghŭm (1713–1775). The lexical configuration of the Tongp’ae naksong evinces the compiler’s disinterest in striving for the stylistic purity typical of composition in orthodox Literary Sinitic (hanmun) as a classical medium and reveals a pattern of embracing diverse non-orthodox Literary Sinitic elements for their rhetorical effects. By demonstrating that the language of the Tongp’ae naksong was deliberately crafted to evoke the linguistic and inscriptional realities of contemporary Chosŏn Korea at the level of words and expressions, the chapter presents the lexical vernacularity of the Tongp’ae naksong and its late eighteenth-century milieu as an important yet neglected site for telling the story of vernacularization in Korea—a story that has been overshadowed by narratives of either the demise or abandonment of Literary Sinitic coupled with the triumph of the Korean script (now called han’gŭl).