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Nan Z. Da offers an in-depth study of nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. literary interactions that highlights their lack of transpacific interpollination. Intransitive Encounter is an unconventional and theoretically rich reflection on global meetings and imaginings that do not fit the patterns proclaimed by postcolonial and literary studies.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Intransitivity
1. Indifference in the Open: Squandering Washington Irving
2. Extreme Reformality: Burning Bridges with Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. Incommunicative Exchange: Yung Wing’s Impersonal Schemes
4. The Things Things Do Not Have to Say: Longfellow to Dong Xun
5. Open Books: Qiu Jin’s Feminist Reading Time
6. Harmless Exaggeration: Edith Eaton’s Tweaks and Glitches
Epilogue: Untracking Encounter
Appendix 1. A Note on Chinese Language Appearances in the Book
Appendix 2. Lexicon
Appendix 3. Historical Movements, Treaties, Organizations, Institutions
Appendix 4. List of Chinese Primary Sources
Appendix 5. List of Chinese Names
Notes
Index
About the author
Nan Z. Da is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Summary
Why should the earliest literary encounters between China and the United States—and their critical interpretation—matter now? How can they help us describe cultural exchanges in which nothing substantial is exchanged, at least not in ways that can easily be tracked? All sorts of literary meetings took place between China and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, involving an unlikely array of figures including canonical Americans such as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Chinese writers Qiu Jin and Dong Xun; and Asian American writers like Yung Wing and Edith Eaton. Yet present-day interpretations of these interactions often read too much into their significance or mistake their nature—missing their particularities or limits in the quest to find evidence of cosmopolitanism or transnational hybridity.
In Intransitive Encounter, Nan Z. Da carefully re-creates these transpacific interactions, plying literary and social theory to highlight their various expressions of indifference toward synthesis, interpollination, and convergence. Da proposes that interpretation trained on such recessive moments and minimal adjustments can light a path for Sino-U.S. relations going forward—offering neither a geopolitical showdown nor a celebration of hybridity but the possibility of self-contained cross-cultural encounters that do not have to confess to the fact of their having taken place. Intransitive Encounter is an unconventional and theoretically rich reflection on how we ought to interpret global interactions and imaginings that do not fit the patterns proclaimed by contemporary literary studies.
Additional text
Intransitive Encounter’s methodological and theoretical contributions will resonate far beyond its field. At the heart of the book and the Sino-U.S. encounters it elucidates are a set of concerns—about the purpose of translation, the limits of cross-cultural communication, the dynamics of literary influence, the materiality and occasionality of literary objects, and what literature can make thinkable or actionable in the world—that are at the center of conversations in modernist studies, comparative literature, cross-cultural communications, and transnational literary studies.
