Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody

In the light of Chinese prosody and various mutually illuminating major cases from the original English, Chinese, French, Japanese and German classical literary texts, the book explores the possibility of discovering a road not taken within the road well-trodden in literature. In an approach of what Wittgenstein calls criss-crossing, this monographic study, the first ever of this nature, as Roger T. Ames points out in the Foreword, also emphasizes a pivotal recognition that these Chinese values [revealed in the book] are immediately relevant to the Western narrative as well; the book demonstrates, in other words, how such a criss-crossing approach would be unequivocally possible as long as our critical attention be adequately turned to or pivoted upon the trivial matters, a posteriori, in accordance with the live syntactic-prosodic context, such as pauses, stresses, phonemes, function words, or the at once text-enlivened and text-enlivening ambiguity of parts of speech, which often vary or alter simultaneously according to and against any definitive definition or set category a priori. This issue pertains to any literary text across cultures because no literary text would ever be possible if it were not, for instance, literally enlivened by the otherwise overlooked meaningless function words or phonemes; the texts simultaneously also enliven these meaningless elements and often turn them surreptitiously into sometimes serendipitously meaningful and beautiful sea-change-effecting les mots justes. Through the immeasurable and yet often imperceptible influences of these exactly right words, our literary texts, such as a poem, could thus not simply be but subtly mean as if by mere means of its simple, rich, and naturally worded being, truly a special word picture of das Ding an sich. Describable metaphorically as museum effect and symphonic tapestry, a special synaesthetic impact could also likely result from such les-mots-justes-facilitated subtle and yet phenomenal sea changes in the texts.