Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody

279 Pages·2018·3.218 MB·English

by  Shudong Chen

Comparative Literature
in the Light of Chinese
Prosody

Comparative Literature
in the Light of Chinese
Prosody
Shudong Chen
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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ISBN 978-1-4985-7338-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4985-7339-9 (electronic)
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Printed in the United States of America
For Pam and John, Emiko and Kunihiko, Doreen, Yeping, Ding, and Deanie

Contents
Foreword by Roger T. Ames ix
Acknowledgments xv
PART I: CONTENT WORDS 1
1 A Word that Makes a World of Difference 3
2 “Le Mot Juste” and “Content Words” 39
3 “Les Mots Justes” as Choices 69
PART II: FUNCTION WORDS 91
4 The Unheard Melodies of the Trivial 93
5 Indispensability of Function Words as Life-Makers 129
6 Serendipity of the Familiar 163
7 Function Words as “Les Mots Justes” 189
8 “Museum Effect” as “Le Mot Juste”: Mediated
“Symphonic Tapestry” 209
Bibliography 233
Index 243
About the Author 253
vii

Foreword
Roger T. Ames
I know Shudong Chen. He is, first and foremost, a scholar with a broad and
comprehensive view of the world’s cultures. And I am delighted to have
this opportunity to write a foreword for his new Lexington Press publica-
tion, Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody. The axis
for Shudong’s entire monograph is his unrelenting advocacy on behalf of
the human imagination. It is a celebration of his own irrepressible love of
language as it is captured in his never-ending search for the right word: le
mot juste. In Shudong’s own preface to this book, euphemistically entitled
“acknowledgments,” he tells the story of the first thirty years of his sojourn
in Middle America by acknowledging the significant human relationships
that have come to shape both his personal and his professional life. But when
we ask the question “What do we mean by relationships?” we realize that in
substance they are nothing other than discourse. They are a “relating to,” a
“giving an account of,” a “communicating with” that in the fullness of time
become the record of our evolving personal identities. And what are our “nar-
ratives” other than the narrating of our spoken and sometime written accounts
of the imbricated events that, when woven together, constitute the stories of
our lives? Indeed, our lives lived together properly considered are continuous
and sometimes happy chat with a coterie of different people who, by talking
with us and listening to us, quite literally change our minds, and in so doing,
become implicated in who we are.
In this model of relationally constituted persons—a very Confucian model
in fact—we are not individuals who associate in our families and commu-
nities, but rather because we associate effectively with each other in our
families and communities, we become distinctive and even distinguished
as the unique individuals we are; we do not have minds and therefore speak
with one another, but rather because we communicate effectively with one
ix