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The approach of this study is essentially a form of structural, or perhaps "constructural," semiotics; it examines what holds the literary text together in the face of its propensity to unravel. Specifically, it looks at a nearly invisible Chinese literary form in a comparative perspective by bringing one type of artifactuality (academic inquiry in English) to bear on a very different sort (Chinese lyricism), thereby illuminating the dynamics of the latter in the cross-light of the former. This is in no way a dismissal of indigenous, culturally intimate ways of knowing the works, nor is it a denial of the cross-current of contradiction and divergence that is always working against the form, always preventing a final interpretation. The aim of this study is to find a middle ground where this methodological cross-light will show the aesthetic whole, along with its inherent disruptions, as a construction that fits patterns of meaning that are culturally and historically bound, even if unstated: the Chinese lyric sequence.
This is an important book for scholars studying Chinese literature, comparative literature, world literature, and poetry-painting.
About the author
Joseph R. Allen is Professor Emeritus of Chinese literature and cultural studies and Founding Chair of the Department Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Trained in classical Chinese poetry at University of Washington, Seattle, Dr. Allen's literary research includes In the Voice of Others: Music Bureau Poetry (1992), and the editing with additional translations of Arthur Waley's Book of Songs (1996). He has also translated and written about modern and contemporary Chinese poetry, including Forbidden Games and Video Poems: The Poetry of Yang Mu and Lo Ch'ing (1993) and Sea of Dreams: The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng (2005). His study of the semiotics of urban space, Taipei: City of Displacements (2012), won the 2014 Levenson Prize in Chinese Studies, awarded by the Association of Asian Studies.
