The Promise and Premise of Creativity: Why Comparative Literature Matters by Eugene Eoyang (review)

Eugene Eoyang’s The Promise and Premise of Creativity: Why Comparative Literature Matters convincingly argues for the importance of studying literature, and comparative literature in particular, in a world where literary studies are often considered to be a marginalized discipline. This book not only reflects the author’s vast knowledge of various national literary traditions, but also explores the intersections between literature and other disciplines, such as economics and science. In answering the question of why comparative literature matters, Eoyang sets forth an example of what comparatists can, and should, do.

The book consists of seventeen chapters and is divided into three parts. The first part, “Preliminaries,” includes three chapters. In this part, Eoyang first outlines the key differences between literary studies and other disciplines, such as science. He demonstrates that literature helps to develop faculties that are essential for living a happy life and proceeds to highlight the significance of comparative literature. The study of comparative literature is not useless because it aims to achieve a deep understanding of different, yet interconnected, cultures, which is key to success in today’s world.

Part two of the book is titled “Approaches.” The fourth chapter, “Macintosh apples and mandarin oranges: Complexities in literary comparison,” lays the theoretical foundation of this part. Eoyang argues that a productive line of inquiry in the field of comparative literature is “to discover significant paradigmatic differences, to explore the surface differences that will lead us to a better understanding of the fundamental cultural assumptions” (53). The next seven chapters included in this part are primarily case studies that exemplify this approach of exploring beyond “surface differences” to decipher “paradigmatic differences.” These chapters deal with a wide array of topics ranging from François Cheng’s French translation of Chinese poems to the growing attention given to the southern hemisphere.

Of note in the second part is Eoyang’s discussion of maodun 矛盾 in chapters nine and ten, which I believe constitutes an underlying thread of the book. Maodun is often translated as “contradiction,” but this translation misses an important aspect of the Chinese term—the “co-existence” of “two mutually contradictory entities” (118). This conceptualization of maodun can shed new light on the writings of Octavio Paz, as Eoyang demonstrates in chapter ten. More importantly, comparative literature is a discipline of maodun: a central argument that he makes in this book is that comparative literature should examine distinctly different cultures as a unity. The last chapter of this part, entitled “The conference as heuristic: Genial and congenial comparison,” can be read as a conclusion to this part. Eoyang champions a genial (dialogic) and congenial (dialectical) approach to the study of comparative literature. In order for this approach to work, the author encourages comparatists to make their discipline more inclusive and to use “creative syncretism” (147) to understand and examine the seemingly conflicting aspects of the same issue.

The last part, entitled “Prospects,” outlines the future directions of comparative literature. Chapter thirteen, the first chapter of this part, underscores the key role that translation plays in the preservation, dissemination, and evaluation of literary texts. The next chapter tackles the bias and misunderstanding involved in cross-cultural interactions and proposes a model of globalized knowledge that unifies “disparate parts” (174). Chapter fifteen discusses the dialectics between the center and the periphery. Eoyang argues that new knowledge is often discovered in “areas characterized as ‘marginal’” (189). He challenges the representative criticisms of comparative literature in the last two chapters of the book. The accusation of comparative literature being completely Eurocentric misrepresents the current situation in this field, whereas the accusations that comparative literature is “ill-defined” or lacking core methodology (205) actually point to the strength of the discipline. At the end of the book, the author proposes a “synaesthetic communication” technique, which allows participants in comparative literature conferences to present their scholarship in languages other than English and French and thus “eliminates any sense of language hegemony” (215).

The Promise and...