GEOPOLITICS OF LITERATURE

Abstract

Foreign literature studies, since its emergence in the early twentieth century, has been an important field of study and discipline in the Chinese humanities. Its emergence, through translation and education, signified a profound transformation in Chinese culture with regard to what literature is and does, and engendered a series of debates on the meanings and functions of literary knowledge at a time when the idea of literature is irrevocably Westernized. These questions and debates refract the Chinese experience of modernity as entering into a traumatic relationship with the West in which China had to reinvent itself as a member in the colonial/modern world system. This article outlines the emergence of foreign literature in the early twentieth-century China, not just as a body of literary texts disseminated through translation and textbooks, but as a cultural institution, fully supported by universities, scholar-critics, and periodicals that redefined the idea of literature in the Chinese context. It contends that the rise of foreign literature was contemporaneous with the rise of modern Chinese literature and national studies, and ushered in a colonial/modern conception of literature – grounded in the ideal of a world republic of letters that is inseparable from missionaries, gunboats, and the Orientalist gaze. Such a notion, moreover, gave rise to a humanist comparativist logic – found in Irving Babbitt's New Humanism – with which early scholars of foreign literature studies sought to revalidate Chinese tradition in the comparative framework of world literature. The New Humanist tenets were instrumental to its later development as a humanist comparativist project that manifests in the pedagogical emphasis on Western classics, its close ties to Chinese literature old and new, and the subsequent development of Chinese-Western comparative poetics. In tracking the emergence of foreign literature studies as a translingual and transpacific formation, I call attention to the ‘geopolitics of literature’, understood as a system of disciplinary and institutional power, interpellating foreign literature scholars into the order of colonial modernity by means of compulsive comparison.