The Promise and Premise of Creativity: Why Comparative Literature Matters

The Promise and Premise of Creativity considers literature in the larger context of globalization and "the clash of cultures." Refuting the view that the study of literature is "useless," Eoyang argues that it expands three distinct intellectual skills: creative imagination, vicarious sympathy, and capacious intuition. With the advent of the personal computer and the blurring of cultural and economic boundaries, it is the ability to imagine, to intuit, and to invent that will mark the educated student, and allow her to survive the rapid pace of change. As never before, the ability to empathize with other peoples, to understand cultures very different from one's own, is vital to success in a globalized world. In this, the very "uselessness" of literature may inure the mind to think creatively. Engaging with both the theory and practice of literature, its past and its potential future, Eoyang claims that our sense of the world at large, of the salient similarities and differences between cultures, would be critically diminished without comparative literature.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Preliminaries 1. Why Study Literature? 2. What's the Story-The Relevance of Literature to Life 3. The Uses of the Useless: Comparative Literature and the Multinational Corporation Approaches 4. Macintosh Apples and Mandarin Oranges: Comparing East and West. 5. Cuentos Chinos ("Chinese Tales"): The Exotic Imaginary 6. Francophone Cathay: Gallicizing China 7. The Persistence of Cathay: China in World Literature8. The Emergence of the Southern Hemisphere in Literature: Neglected Domains 9. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Modern and the Postmodern: Ethnocentricities 10. Cultural Logics: Contradiction vs. Maodun 11. Dialectical Maodun in the Works of Octavio Paz: The Mestizo Mind 12. Meaningful and Meaningless Comparison: The Heuristic and the Invidious Prospects 13. The Globalization of Knowledge: Comparative Literature as Interdisciplinary and Multilingual Discourse 14. The Glocalization of Knowledge: The Ends of the World or the Edge of Heaven 15. The Undisciplined Discipline: Comparative Literature and Creative Wandering 16. Synergies and Synaesthesia: An Intraworldly Comparative Literature Bibliography Index

About the Author :
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).

Review :
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. With departments of literature (including comparative and national literatures) being shut down across the United States, a text that opens with the question 'Why Study Literature'-and more importantly, answers it compellingly-is absolutely timely. Eugene Eoyang is uniquely situated to write such a volume. His own background in Comparative Literature, his past presidency of the American Comparative Literature Association, his ability to work in both Western and Eastern literatures and languages, his familiarity with both the American higher education context and a major Asian university, all provide Eoyang with the depth and breadth of knowledge one needs for a project such as this one. His investigation of the relationship of literature to life and his defense of the 'useless' (by which Eoyang means something very important indeed) are much needed in today's economy and today's broader sense of cultures in contact. The Promise and Premise of Creativity: Why Comparative Literature Matters is a book that has been crying to be written for the last several decades. The first part's exposition of the importance of literary study eloquently addresses many students' and some administrators' uncertainty about literature's value in a largely technological age in both a broad as well as deeply personal sense. The second considers some of the initial and regrettably long-persisting shortcomings and fallacious assumptions upon which comparative literature has been based. With Chinese as a case study, compelling solutions to a considerable number of these methodological problems are advanced in a wide-ranging international context. It is a superb volume and a significant contribution to the field in terms of its probing insight and critical sophistication. Carefully researched and gracefully written with a comparative perspective, this book explores literature in the larger context of globalization and 'the clash of cultures' combining a range of theoretical approaches with a number of case-studies. Sticking firmly to refuting the position that the study of literature is 'useless,' Eugene Eoyang argues that it expands into three distinct intellectual skills: creative imagination, vicarious sympathy and capacious intuition. Eugene Eoyang claims that our sense of the world at large, of the salient similarities and differences between cultures, would be critically diminished without comparative literature.