Description
Book SynopsisNan Z. Da offers an in-depth study of nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. literary interactions that highlights their lack of transpacific interpollination.
Intransitive Encounter is an unconventional and theoretically rich reflection on global meetings and imaginings that do not fit the patterns proclaimed by postcolonial and literary studies.
Trade ReviewIn this bracingly intelligent and impressively researched study of nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. encounters, Nan Z. Da focuses on transnational exchanges in which not much of anything is exchanged and worlds are not transformed. The result is a transformative book that challenges assumptions about transnationalism and maps out productive new ways of exploring the limits of cultural exchange. -- Robert S. Levine, author of
Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary StudiesNan Z. Da has written the first great book on nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. literary relations and a truly great book on the current state of comparative literature. Da's beautiful readings of what she calls the many 'intransitive encounters' between Chinese and American literature demonstrate the ways in which the idea of a global, East-West world literature is a fantasy that obscures the much more interesting differences, failures, and untranslatable moments that have generated a long history of literary criticism. This book should be required reading for students and scholars of American and comparative literature. -- Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine
Intransitive Encounter offers nothing less than a complete reimagining of the literary encounter. With acuity, archival sensitivity, and analytic insight, Nan Z. Da argues that previous assumptions about transnational literary contact have perpetuated a hermeneutic that crosses out as much as it crosses over—and that what gets crossed out is precisely an opportunity to see the literary as a different kind of encounter. -- R. John Williams, author of
The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and WestDa makes a unique contribution to transpacific literary studies and suggests a new approach to transnationalism that is theoretically sophisticated, historically revisionist, and potentially paradigm changing.
Intransitive Encounter is a work of great originality, imagination, and erudition. -- Yunte Huang, University of California, Santa Barbara
Highly recommended. * Choice *
Intransitive Encounter’s methodological and theoretical contributions will resonate far beyond its field. At the heart of the book and the Sino-U.S. encounters it elucidates are a set of concerns—about the purpose of translation, the limits of cross-cultural communication, the dynamics of literary influence, the materiality and occasionality of literary objects, and what literature can make thinkable or actionable in the world—that are at the center of conversations in modernist studies, comparative literature, cross-cultural communications, and transnational literary studies. * Modernism/modernity *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Intransitivity
1. Indifference in the Open: Squandering Washington Irving
2. Extreme Reformality: Burning Bridges with Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. Incommunicative Exchange: Yung Wing’s Impersonal Schemes
4. The Things Things Do Not Have to Say: Longfellow to Dong Xun
5. Open Books: Qiu Jin’s Feminist Reading Time
6. Harmless Exaggeration: Edith Eaton’s Tweaks and Glitches
Epilogue: Untracking Encounter
Appendix 1. A Note on Chinese Language Appearances in the Book
Appendix 2. Lexicon
Appendix 3. Historical Movements, Treaties, Organizations, Institutions
Appendix 4. List of Chinese Primary Sources
Appendix 5. List of Chinese Names
Notes
Index
