A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller's Lectures in China

Since 1988, Prof. J. Hillis Miller has traveled to China over a dozen times and delivered more than thirty public lectures to an audience of college professors, students, scholars, and artists from a broad spectrum of Chinese society. His lectures aroused immense interest from Chinese academia as well as local and national media. It may well be claimed that he is the most influential among Western scholars who have actually traveled to China since China entered the New Period of Reform and Openness and exerted a profound and salutary impact on Chinese humanistic scholarship, especially in the fields of literary studies, media studies, and cultural studies. In a way, it is no exaggeration to say that Miller's China lectures have contributed significantly to the reestablishment of literary criticism, literary theory, comparative literature, and cultural studies in China after the Mao Era. Recently, Miller carefully selected fifteen lectures from among his thirty-odd lectures in China, revised them with necessary background information, and put them together into a collection with a meaningful title: An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China.¹ Its title is a parody of Mark Twain's popular book The Innocents Abroad (1869), but has entirely opposite intentions and themes. Twain's book is a record of his travels to Europe and the Holy Land with a group of American travelers. Ostensibly, it describes the innocent and even foolish behavior of the Americans, but its sometimes witty and comic, and sometimes biting and satirical tones and descriptions explicitly or implicitly ridicule and criticize the conservative society and backward customs of the old world.² Miller's book title is not at all meant to be a satirical one. Rather, as he informs us in the "Introduction," his parody has a double meaning. On the one hand, it alludes to his status as an alien in an alien land; on the other, it is meant to recognize that he is an ignoramus who knows nothing about Chinese language, literature, and culture, and his lecture trip is therefore a process of learning from the other.

Prof. Miller's book is prefaced by Prof. Fredric Jameson, another American critic and theorist who has lectured many times in China and is widely known in Chinese academia. Prof. Jameson highly praises the book and summarizes its core ideas in these pithy words: "The heart of the work remains the new and urgent contemporary problem of not what literature is but whether it can survive in any recognizable form in globalization, a problem that promises to tell us as much about globalization as it does about literature."³ Indeed, although Prof. Miller's new book employs multiple perspectives, macrocosmic worldview, and microcosmic analyses, and covers English literature, comparative literature, world literature, literary theory, and cultural studies, its emphasis is laid on addressing and exploring the impact of globalization, new media, and new technology upon literature and literary studies. It focuses on his reflections of how the human sciences can adequately deal with the encroachment and impact. Some lectures in the book were those designated by the Chinese institutions of higher learning which invited him to lecture; some others were on topics chosen by Miller himself, and still others were his reflections arising from his interactions with Chinese scholars and students during his visits. All of them contain his observations of and insights into the great changes that have taken place in China as a result of Chinese academia's responses to economic development and technological advances, and at the same time reveal the evolution of his own thinking and the deepening of his critical vision. As a whole, Lectures in China places literature in the large context of globalization and brings forth new perspectives and deep thoughts on literary studies. This article will briefly introduce the major ideas of each chapter, continues with critical comments on the characteristic features and assessment of its value for cross-cultural literary studies, and finally attempt to...