Sinographies: Writing China - Tapa dura

The essays in this thought-provoking volume investigate ideas of China and Chineseness by means of a broad range of texts, languages, and contexts that surround what the editors call the "various written Chinas"through history. Analyzing discourse of civilization, geography, ethics, ethnicity, writing, and differences about China-from within the country and from outside-this work deliberately disrupts the boundaries that have previously defined China as an object of study. Sinographies depends on a respect for the power of texts to shape realities both backward and forward, to create or foreclose possibilities not only of interpretation but of experience. To this end, the essays examine topics as various as colonialism, literary modernism, translation, anime, and Tibet. As a whole, the volume imagines sinography as a new methodological approach to the study of China, one that clears unexpected ground for new kinds of comparative work. Contributors: Timothy Billings, Middlebury College; Christopher Bush, Princeton U; Rey Chow, Brown U; Danielle Glassmeyer, U of Alabama, Birmingham; Timothy Kendall; Walter S. H. Lim, National U of Singapore; Lucien Miller, U of Massachusetts; David Porter, U of Michigan; Carlos Rojas, U of Florida; Steven J. Venturino, Loyola U; Henk Vynckier, Tunghai U, Taiwan. Eric Hayot is associate professor of comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Haun Saussy is Bird White Housum Professor of comparative literature at Yale University. Steven G. Yao is associate professor of English at Hamilton College.

Haun Saussy is Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Steven Yao is Professor of English at Hamilton College, where he teaches Anglo-American modernism, Asian American literature, and translation history and theory. His publications include Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2010). He is also co-editor of the essay collections Sinographies: Writing China (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Pacific Rim Modernisms (Univeristy of Toronto Press, 2009). His essays have appeared in Textual Practice, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and Representations.