East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture

East Asia is reaching into the world. The number of Chinese students and scholars studying at foreign universities has never been larger, the “Korean wave” washes K-dramas and K-pop ashore all continents, and Japanese manga and anime garner millions of young fans in New Delhi and Cape Town, Oslo and Vladivostok, New York and Rome. Popular culture proves a powerful medium to connect East Asian countries to the world, but also to each other, softening the divisions that the twentieth century has brought to this region.

Much of what a good century ago connected the East Asian “Sinographic Sphere” of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—cultures that traditionally relied on the Chinese script and literary language—has disappeared. East Asians around the year 1900 still communicated through the authoritative lingua franca of Literary Chinese. For almost two millennia “Chinese-style writing” had been the language of government, scholarship, Buddhism, and belles-lettres: Under China’s hegemony many states adopted Chinese culture and its script during the first millennium ce. During the second millennium Japan, Vietnam, and Korea developed phonographic scripts that led to the gradual abandonment of Chinese characters in Korea and Vietnam and the blossoming of local vernacular literatures. In the early twentieth century reformers inspired by Western ideas of “nation states” and “national languages” spearheaded vernacular movements that swept Chinese-style writing and the intellectual and literary culture that went with it aside.

The death of Literary Chinese as East Asia’s venerable literary language over the past century and its replacement with the English language and Western culture marks an irreversible and little noticed inflection point in the history of humanity: the disappearance of the world’s last cultural sphere where a strongly “logographic” script (recording meaning of “words” rather than “sounds” as “phonographic” alphabets do) had enabled distinctive literary cultures to thrive for almost two millennia. The world history of writing starts with strongly logographic writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Chinese characters and Mesoamerican glyphs. Phonographic scripts have long since replaced all but Chinese characters. Thanks to the logographic writing system East Asia’s “bi-literacy”—textual production in Literary Chinese and local vernaculars—functioned quite differently from alphabetic lingua francas. Europe’s bilingualism during the Medieval Period was rooted in Latin, both spoken and read. In contrast, Chinese characters allowed East Asians (including speakers of Chinese dialects) to pronounce any given text in Literary Chinese in their local vernacular language.

Thus East Asia shared a “grapholect,” or scripta franca, as we should call it more appropriately. In the absence of a common spoken language, people could communicate in “brush talk,” conversing by passing paper back and forth. Around the year 1900 East Asian elites were still part of a shared world of transnational education and Bildung through intensive training in the Chinese Classics or a Chinese-style civil service examination system that brought elites in Hanoi and Seoul closer to each other than they were to their fellow peasant countrymen living in a village just outside the capital. The last Chinese-style civil service examinations were held in Vietnam in 1919 under the French colonial government, fourteen years after the abolishment of the examination system in China herself.

The painful history of wars and colonial exploitation in the twentieth century has added yet more visceral divisions and, more recently, economic and military competition have done little to mend rifts. Rather they add to the global stream of daily news that define East Asia, negatively, as a region that fights over history text books and the naming of war events as “massacres” or “incidents,” struggles over appropriate ways to honor the war dead, and quibbles over uninhabited islands. Because national ideologies have come to define East Asia over the past century, the death of East Asia’s biliteracy and the shared culture it afforded have gone largely unlamented.

But the awareness of this common heritage is not just of academic relevance or nostalgic interest. Rather, bringing the rich histories of shared and contested legacies back into collective memory within East Asia and into public consciousness throughout the world, while not erasing all the complicated political and ideological issues generated by recent history, will contribute to the creation of a positive transnational identity where Japanese or Koreans will hopefully one day proudly call themselves “East Asians,” just as most French and Germans have overcome their war wounds and both would call themselves “Europeans” today.

This is the most ambitious goal of Brill’s book series East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture. The book series responds to a swiftly growing need as educational curricula, research agendas, and journalistic writing aim for an ever more inclusive global scope. With the increasing international importance of East Asia in economic, political, and cultural terms, more and more scholars and general readers are seeking a better grasp of this part of the world which can boast long-standing histories and traditions as well as vibrating modern cultures.

East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture responds to the need for a deeper understanding and appreciation of this region by publishing substantial comparative research on the literary and cultural traditions of East Asia and their relation to the world. We showcase original research on the methodology and practice of comparison, including intra-East Asian comparisons of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam; East–west comparisons that examine Western alongside East Asian traditions; and comparative studies that examine East Asian literatures and cultures in the light of their relations with India, the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America. The series focuses on interpretive sciences, that is, the core Humanities of literature, history, religion, philosophy and thought, art history, but also welcomes contributions adopting culturally-informed approaches in archeology, historical geography, anthropology, political science, sociology, or linguistics. It befits our historical moment well to make sure that we as scholars combine comparative analysis with the depth of area-study-expertise and philology, theoretical acumen, and a courageous orientation towards the exploration of fundamental questions. This is the tall order that this book series and its authors are taking on. We are confident, however, that the book series we put forward in response to the rapidly growing interest in the entire East Asian region will make significant contributions to scholarship and mutual understanding and successfully integrate knowledge about and approaches to different literary and cultural traditions through critical examination in comparison.

Wiebke Denecke

Zhang Longxi