Texts and Images in a National, Comparative, and World Context

Knowledge is a matter of parts and the whole. We speak about texts and images, compare and agglomerate them into categories. We break texts into fiction and non-fiction, into disciplinary fields like philosophy, literature, and history. These divisions are also temporal or contextual because literature or letters became more specific with the development of the German and, later, global research university, so that departments and faculties from the nineteenth century onward developed in literary, historical, and philosophical fields in which specialists came to guard their texts, sometimes the way dragons guarded their hoard. Often, texts by the same author could be studied in these and other fields, but with different methodologies. In the eighteenth century, for instance, Voltaire could write philosophy, history, and literature, something the modern research university would have made more difficult had he been on faculty.

Within each of these disciplines were sub-disciplines like social history, economic history, cultural history, and intellectual history, or Continental philosophy and analytical philosophy, or English literature, Chinese literature, comparative literature, and world literature. Finding a field theory was a difficult task in a proliferation of fields and sub-fields. Thus, literary studies had contending claims among national literatures, comparative literature, and world literature. What was and is to be done? That I am trained in history and literature only complicates matters in this context of universities from the nineteenth century forward, partly because of the specialization of knowledge, but also because there are more and more fields and schools of theory and practice. With imperial expansion and with globalization, nations were important as part of internal colonization, before the external colonization of exploration and settlement. Nations needed national literatures at the heart of empire, but at the same time, they were producing conditions for comparison within and between empires and of world institutions and literatures that intensified from the time of Goethe onward. As such, the expansion and globalization of the European empires simultaneously developed nationalism, comparison, and transnationalism, the very conditions that allow the coexistence of national literature, comparative literature, and world literature. There are, then, tensions, frictions and divisions, but also a complementarity of the three.

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This three-part relation—national, comparative, world—coexists and overlaps as well as, at times, appearing to be rivalrous. Chinese literature is itself, but China itself, before being a modern nation, had changing boundaries, foreign dynasties, and influenced neighbouring countries such as Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam in literature, culture, and language. Although Chinese has more linguistic continuity than the languages of European states, it also has experienced changes in which the literature of the state or nation, of the empire, and of the adjacent world overlapped. Over the centuries, China has developed a far-reaching diaspora in Asia, and later in the Americas, Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Some Chinese write in Mandarin, but others compose in other languages within China, and, overseas, Chinese writers might write in Mandarin and in another language, such as French or English. One can be Chinese in many ways over time. Some Chinese writers cannot read, speak, or write their ancestral language. Identity and literature are intricate.

For instance, the fictional worlds of Ha Jin and Yan Geling illustrate this difference within a national literature and suggest the centrifugal forces that operate alongside the centripetal ones of national literary culture. Both of these writers, as Guo Rong has noted, left China in the 1980s and attended graduate programs in the United States. Both write in different languages. Whereas Yan uses Chinese for the most part, Jin mainly employs English. Nonetheless, they were both out of China, which gave them a different perspective to consider their native land and their people (see Guo). Within Chinese literature, for instance, there are vast numbers of interests, themes, and genres over time. One such aspect of Chinese literature is the family saga in twentieth-century fiction in China. As Xinhui Liu has maintained, the purpose of the family saga novel is to show how the writer interprets history against which the family is represented and "the textualization of history" is achieved. The...