The Promise and Premise of Creativity

Eugene Eoyang is Professor Emeritus of English, Humanities, Translation, and General Education at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China, and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, USA. He is the author of five books, including The Transparent Eye: Translation, Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 'Borrowed Plumage': Polemical Essays on Translation (Rodopi Publishers, 2003), and Two-Way Mirrors: Cross-Cultural Studies in Glocalization (Lexington Books, 2007) as well as the editor of three volumes, including Ai Qing: Selected Poems, Edited with an Introduction and Notes (The Foreign Languages Press/Indiana University Press, 1982; the first book co-published by a U. S. publisher and a press in the People's Republic of China) and, with Lin Yao-fu, Translating Chinese Literature (Indiana University Press, 1995). He is past President of the American Comparative Literature Association and Head of the Intercultural Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (1997-2004).

• ForewordPreliminaries1. Why Study Literature? 2. What's the Story-The Relevance of Literature to Life3. The Uses of the Useless: Comparative Literature and the Multinational CorporationApproaches4. Macintosh Apples and Mandarin Oranges: Comparing East and West.5. Cuentos Chinos ("Chinese Tales"): The Exotic Imaginary6. Francophone Cathay: Gallicizing China7. The Persistence of Cathay: China in World Literature8. The Emergence of the Southern Hemisphere in Literature: Neglected Domains9. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Modern and the Postmodern: Ethnocentricities10. Cultural Logics: Contradiction vs. Maodun11. Dialectical Maodun in the Works of Octavio Paz: The Mestizo Mind12. Meaningful and Meaningless Comparison: The Heuristic and the InvidiousProspects13. The Globalization of Knowledge: Comparative Literature as Interdisciplinary and Multilingual Discourse14. The Glocalization of Knowledge: The Ends of the World or the Edge of Heaven15. The Undisciplined Discipline: Comparative Literature and Creative Wandering16. Synergies and Synaesthesia: An Intraworldly Comparative LiteratureBibliographyIndex

"This thoroughly engaging volume by an eminent comparatist examines the relevance of literature in modern life, with particular attention paid to the value of Comparative Literature as a field of study.  In a series of essays, Eoyang challenges recent attempts to supplant Comparative Literature or announce its demise.  He celebrates its viability as a discipline, its response to the Western biases of World Literature, its role as an alternative to multiculturalism's marketing of the Other, and its relationship to translation.  Eoyang presents Comparative Literature as a multilingual "undisciplined discipline" that seeks to bridge cultural incommensurability." -- Dorothy Figueira, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Georgia, USA, Honorary President, International Comparative Literature Association, Editor of Recherche littéraire/Literary Research