Sense and Sensibility: Giving Notes in Chinese and English Literary Writings

Abstract

ABSTRACT Notes are not secondary or supplementary. They provide text with sensible guidance, supported by serious scholarship. More importantly, they embrace controversial ideas and polemical attitudes. Such notes with both sense and sensibility facilitate the expression of personal ideas more efficiently than the text; they may even sustain the development of a literary work, a theoretical topic, or even a field of study by inheriting and provoking lively and consistent scholarly discussion. Such a practice, interestingly, has long appeared in both Chinese and English literary writings. By reviewing discussions about these paradoxical notes in both Chinese and English literary criticism and by examining the notes in The Waste Land and the Book of Poetry respectively, the article proposes that it is a shared practice in both English and Chinese writings to provide notes with both sense and sensibility, and such a practice not only has helped sustain lively and consistent studies of the two specific literary works in their respective writing traditions but also proves that notes, instead of being secondary and supplementary, reveal a new discourse that awaits in uncovering further profound findings.