Literary Resonances against Ideological Echo Chambers: Wu Zhuoliu’s Orphan of Asia and the Necessity of World Literature

Abstract

Literary Resonances against Ideological Echo Chambers: Wu Zhuoliu’s Orphan of Asia and the Necessity of World Literature Flair Donglai Shi Acoustic Metaphors and the Post-critical In a meeting report delivered at Menlo Park, California in 1989, Stephen Greenblatt reiterated his influential ideas on New Historicism and offered two key concepts with regards to the effects of artworks upon their audiences. Highlighted in the title of the report, “Resonance and Wonder,” these two concepts may correspond to different modes of critique dominating the studies of literature and culture today: By “resonance” I mean the power of the object displayed to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which, as metaphor or more simply, as metonymy, it may be taken by a viewer to stand. By “wonder” I mean the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention. (Greenblatt 19–20) In the specific case he is discussing, Greenblatt perceives the contextual matters framing an artwork in an exhibition as catalysts for resonance and would rather do away with them so as to give way to the more organic reactions of wonder it can induce upon its audiences. In other words, he thinks that the spontaneity of the audience’s appreciation of art is more effectively activated and better preserved without them reading any background or explanatory information on the works on display. However, to take these terms more abstractly or metaphorically, we can observe that “resonance” leans towards the more conventional investigation of the contexts in which a given text or artwork has been conceived, produced, and received, and the methods used to enable the investigation of such enabling structures are usually rationalist, empiricist, or analytical, constituting an intellectual tradition from [End Page 552] the times of René Descartes that can be called the critical (Cohen 172). By contrast, “wonder” is immediate, reactive, and emotional, which, in a new-historicist fashion, approximates the affective turn in critical theory and tends to aspects of the reception of a given text or artwork that are less formal, calculated, or dialectical. As such, “wonder” seems to approach what Rita Felski terms “the post-critical,” a way of reading with an emphasis on “the transtemporal movement of texts and their lively agency” (173). For Greenblatt, the concept of resonance has affinities with the school of New Historicism, because the latter’s main concern with literary texts “has been to recover as far as possible the historical circumstances of their original production and consumption and to analyze the relationship between these circumstances and our own” (20). Between critique and appreciation, Greenblatt advocates for the latter and makes it clear that an a priori preoccupation with contexts and structures in New Historicism hinders the act of interpretation since “the impact of most exhibitions is likely to be greater if the initial appeal is wonder-a wonder that then leads to the desire for resonance for it is easier to pass from wonder to resonance than from resonance to wonder” (34). Notably, in Greenblatt’s ideal interpretative paradigm, wonder and resonance are not mutually exclusive but should better come into effect in that exact order: wonder first, resonance second. However, by dictating this ideal order of things, Greenblatt does assume that wonder and resonance are always separate entities or processes that share no temporal or operative overlaps. That is why I would argue that his conceptualization of wonder only seems to approach Felski’s formulation of the post-critical. Felski’s focus on “the transtemporal movement of texts” stresses qualities of sustained relevance and broad appeal but does not necessarily ignore the significance of contexts and their impact on the ontological and phenomenological conditions surrounding the texts in question. The “post-” in “post-critical” does not mark a total departure from the convention of text-context investigation. Instead, it is an opposition to the ideological rigidity with which critique is often carried out: a “hermeneutics of suspicion” seeking to uncover “a text’s oppressive effects” and “gesturing...