Comparative Literature Studies

Eric Hayot
Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (review)
Comparative Literature Studies - Volume 45, Number 1, 2008, pp. 122-126

Penn State University Press

Project MUSE - Comparative Literature Studies - Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (review) Project MUSE Journals Comparative Literature Studies Volume 45, Number 1, 2008 Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (review) Comparative Literature Studies Volume 45, Number 1, 2008 E-ISSN: 1528-4212 Print ISSN: 0010-4132 DOI: 10.1353/cls.0.0001 Reviewed by Eric HayotThe Pennsylvania State University Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West. By Zhang Longxi. Cornell University Press, 2005. x + 256 pp. $39.95. This book continues the project Zhang Longxi began in The Tao and the Logos (1992) and made explicit in Mighty Opposites (1999): to assert, against those who would argue for the incommensurability of cultures, that whatever differences appear through the lens of anthropological or literary hermeneutics do not cut one kind from another. "I will argue," he writes in the introductory chapter, "that the belief in the possibility of common knowledge and cross-cultural understanding, in the availability of conceptual tools for the interpretation of human behavior across the boundaries of language, geography, culture, and time, can indeed come from a genuine appreciation of the equal capabilities of different individuals, peoples, and nations" (11). As in Mighty Opposites, where a distinction between the "identical" and the "equal" grounded in explicitly Heideggerean terms allowed Zhang to insist on the...