Intransitive Encounter

Nan Da

Published by Columbia University Press 2018

Intransitive Encounter

Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange

Nan Da

https://doi.org/10.7312/da--18802

Overview
Contents

About this book

Nan 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.

Author information

Da Nan :

Nan Da (University of Michigan, Ph.D.) is assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her scholarly essays have been published in American Literary History, Signs, J19, and The Henry James Review. She has also published in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books.Nan Z. Da is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Reviews

Yunte Huang, University of California, Santa Barbara:
Da 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.

R. John Williams, author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West:
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.

Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine:
Nan 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.

Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies:
In 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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION. Intransitivity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter One. INDIFFERENCE IN THE OPEN Squandering Washington Irving Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
Chapter Two. EXTREME REFORMALITY Burning Bridges with Ralph Waldo Emerson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
Chapter Three. INCOMMUNICATIVE EXCHANGE Yung Wing’s Impersonal Schemes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
Chapter Four. THE THINGS THINGS DO NOT HAVE TO SAY Longfellow to Dong Xun Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Chapter Five. OPEN BOOKS Qiu Jin’s Feminist Reading Time Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	162
Chapter Six. HARMLESS EXAGGERATION Edith Eaton’s Tweaks and Glitches Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
EPILOGUE. Untracking Encounter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Appendix 1. A NOTE ON CHINESE LANGUAGE APPEARANCES IN THE BOOK Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Appendix 2. LEXICON Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
APPENDIX 3. HISTORICAL MOVEMENTS, TREATIES, ORGANIZATIONS, INSTITUTIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
Appendix 4. CHINESE PRIMARY SOURCES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Appendix 5. CHINESE NAMES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	289

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 6 b&w illustrations

eBook

Published: January 14, 2019
ISBN: 9780231547628