[PDF] Sound And Script In Chinese Diaspora eBook

Author : Jing Tsu
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 41,58 MB
Release : 2011-01-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0674060547

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What happens when language wars are not about hurling insults or quibbling over meanings, but are waged in the physical sounds and shapes of language itself? Native and foreign speakers, mother tongues and national languages, have jostled for distinction throughout the modern period. The fight for global dominance between the English and Chinese languages opens into historical battles over the control of the medium through standardization, technology, bilingualism, pronunciation, and literature in the Sinophone world. Encounters between global languages, as well as the internal tensions between Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, present a dynamic, interconnected picture of languages on the move. In Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, Jing Tsu explores the new global language trade, arguing that it aims at more sophisticated ways of exerting influence besides simply wielding knuckles of power. Through an analysis of the different relationships between language standardization, technologies of writing, and modern Chinese literature around the world from the nineteenth century to the present, this study transforms how we understand the power of language in migration and how that is changing the terms of cultural dominance. Drawing from an unusual array of archival sources, this study cuts across the usual China-West divide and puts its finger on the pulse of a pending supranational world under “literary governance.”

Author : Jing Tsu
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 20,29 MB
Release : 2022-01-18
Category : History
ISBN : 0735214743

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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

Author : Jing Tsu
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 37,88 MB
Release : 2010-09-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9004186913

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Presenting an array of cutting edge perspectives on modern Chinese literature in different Sinophone contexts, this volume of essays offers a wide range of critical approaches to the study of an emerging interdisciplinary field.

Author : Jing Tsu
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 11,26 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780804751766

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How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference.

Author : Kathryn Babayan
Publisher : Harvard CMES
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 13,30 MB
Release : 2008
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674032040

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This anthology explores different genealogies of sexuality and questions some of the theoretical emphases and epistemic assumptions affecting current histories of sexuality.

Author : Nathan Vedal
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 37,55 MB
Release : 2022-04-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0231553765

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Winner, 2023 Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas The scholarly culture of Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) is often seen as prioritizing philosophy over concrete textual study. Nathan Vedal uncovers the preoccupation among Ming thinkers with specialized linguistic learning, a field typically associated with the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century. He explores the collaboration of Confucian classicists and Buddhist monks, opera librettists and cosmological theorists, who joined forces in the pursuit of a universal theory of language. Drawing on a wide range of overlooked scholarly texts, literary commentaries, and pedagogical materials, Vedal examines how Ming scholars positioned the study of language within an interconnected nexus of learning. He argues that for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers, the boundaries among the worlds of classicism, literature, music, cosmology, and religion were far more fluid and porous than they became later. In the eighteenth century, Qing thinkers pared away these other fields from linguistic learning, creating a discipline focused on corroborating the linguistic features of ancient texts. Documenting a major transformation in knowledge production, this book provides a framework for rethinking global early modern intellectual developments. It offers a powerful alternative to the conventional understanding of late imperial Chinese intellectual history by focusing on the methods of scholarly practice and the boundaries by which contemporary thinkers defined their field of study.

Author : Denise Y. Ho
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 16,30 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Art
ISBN : 1108417957

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Curating Revolution examines how Mao-era exhibitions shaped popular understandings of, and participation in, the political campaigns of China's Communist revolution.

Author : Jing Tsu
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 50,8 MB
Release : 2023-01-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0735214735

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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

Author : Yunte Huang
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 30,53 MB
Release : 2022-11-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0226822664

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Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning. In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. “Chinese whispers” refers to an American children’s game dating to the years of the Cold War, a period in which everything Chinese, or even Chinese sounding, was suspect. Taking up various manifestations of the phrase in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Huang investigates how poetry, always to a significant degree untranslatable, complicates the transpacific production of meanings and values. The book opens with the efforts of I. A. Richards, arguably the founder of Anglo-American academic literary criticism, to promote Basic English in China in the early twentieth century. It culminates by resituating Ernest Fenollosa’s famous essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” exploring the ways in which Chinese has historically enriched but also entrapped the Western conception of language.

Author : Andrea Bachner
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 23,66 MB
Release : 2014-01-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0231164521

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New communication and information technologies remain challenging for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, both within China and different parts of the West. Approaching this history from alternative theoretical perspectives, this volume pinpoints the phenomena binding languages, scripts, and medial expressions to cultural and national identity. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete “scripting” of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a new critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing.