Sino-methodologies, a Draft

Abstract

A & Q 59 Back to January 1991. I left Seoul to arrive in Moscow to be as far away from home as possible. My youthful impulse drove me to expand my limited horizons and to experience something radically different than what I felt so close to my skin. But then, I did not realize that the two cities that marked the departure and arrival of this journey had once been ruled by the same Mongolian Empire. The immense snow-covered plain near Moscow could have been a mirror to reflect on the past of my own native land. Suk-Young Kim is professor of theater and Asian studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of DMZ Crossing (2014), the winner of the Palais Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for Illusive Utopia (2010), and a coauthor of Long Road Home (2009). 6 Work Cited Blok, Aleksandr. 1968. “Skify.” In Selected Poems of Aleksandr Blok, ed. James B. Woodward, 93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 6 Notes 1. http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/ scythians_blok.html. 2. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective “Eurasian” first appeared in the English language in 1844 to stand for “mixed European and Asiatic (esp. Indian) parentage,” and then again in 1868 to designate “of or pertaining to Eurasia, i.e. to Europe and Asia considered as forming in reality one continent.” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/65 078?rskey=C4°gGo&result=6&isAdvanced=false#. 3. http://www.indiana.edu/~ceus/. 4. http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k44783&pageid=icb .page540986. 5. Ibid. 6. http://www.acls.org/research/aclsfellows.aspx?id=936. Sino-methodologies, a Draft Martin Svensson Ekström I start from a feeling of resistance. Allow me to read narrowly and with emphasis, rather than broadly: “What is the idea, your own or someone else’s, whose future most excites you today?” 60 A & Q I “do” early Chinese poetry and poetics. I also “do” their GraecoRoman counterparts, as well as taking an interest in the formation of Swedish and European Sinology as a discipline in the early 1700s, and especially for the bizarre (psycho-)logic of certain descriptions of China and the Chinese language at the time of the breakdown of the Swedish Empire. I consider myself to be “theory informed.” I “reflect epistemologically ” on the presumptions on which, for instance, my intertwined readings of Plato’s Sophist and Xunzi’s “phantasmatic” analysis of the Zhou Dynasty burial rituals rest. The American academic institution of comparative literature is, from my perspective, a great thing. The division in my homestead of “literary studies” into those conducted at departments of the science of literature and those at language departments is odious, provincial, and counterproductive . The mainstream Sinologist will ask you, exasperatedly and with trembling hands, what on earth the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit has to do with Xunzi’s claim that human nature needs to be “falsified /improved upon” (wei 偽). The “literary scientist,” conversely, will already have impatiently shown you the door when she saw that your dissertation project had the audacity to venture outside the confines of the Western tradition (see Nyström 2010). Here, at this deadlock, comparative literature ideally provides a space where the suffocating scholar may breathe, reflect, and form new synapses. The air, however, may at times be a trifle thin.1 Although now based in Sweden, I was partially trained in area studies and comparative literature à la américaine, and the admiration and sense of belonging that I initially felt were slowly infused with, but never erased by, a sense of frustration—with projects and lectures that never moved beyond the broad cross-cultural sweeps and momentary “close readings” of their grand overtures: with the triple pirouettes (“Australian Aboriginal Art through Kant’s Third Critique and Lacan’s Seminar XIV”); with the metapoetical readings (“this poem enacts the very metaphorical process that it rhetorically refutes”), which undoubtedly may be “brilliant” in their ingenuity but also sterile when, as often, not further contextualized; with the Reports, the Congresses, and the Key Note Speeches. This is my point: why be excited by the “future” of an “idea”? Are an idea and its...