The Chinese language Research Program at Fordham College is internet hosting on on-line Winter Colloquium Sequence that includes outstanding students within the area. Our second visitor is Haun Saussy, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Comparative Literature on the College of Chicago, who will give a chat on his newly revealed e-book, The Making of Barbarians: Chinese language Literature and Multilingual Asia (Princeton College Press 2022), on Thursday, March 30, 5-6:30pm EDT, by way of Zoom. Please register with this hyperlink:
Registered company will obtain the Zoom hyperlink earlier than the occasion.
Here’s a abstract of Prof. Saussy’s e-book from Princeton College Press:
Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature typically take Eurocentrism because the goal of their critique. However literature is a universe with many facilities, and certainly one of them is China. The Making of Barbarians affords an account of world literature during which China, as heart, produces its personal margins. Right here Sinologist and comparatist Haun Saussy investigates the meanings of literary translation, adaptation, and appropriation on the boundaries of China lengthy earlier than it got here into sustained contact with the West.
When students speak about comparative literature in Asia, they have an inclination to concentrate on translation between European languages and Chinese language, Korean, and Japanese, as practiced since about 1900. In distinction, Saussy focuses on the interval earlier than 1850, when the interpretation of international works into Chinese language was uncommon as a result of Chinese language literary custom overshadowed these round it.
The Making of Barbarians appears intently at literary works that have been translated into Chinese language from international languages or resulted from contact with alien peoples. The e-book explores why translation was such an undervalued follow in premodern China, and the way this huge and prestigious tradition handled these outdoors it earlier than a brand new group of foreigners—Europeans—appeared on the horizon.
