Reshaping East Asia, Rethinking World Literature

This special issue of Symposium breaks ground in a new area for the journal: “East Asia,” broadly defined. The relevance of the literatures of East Asia warrants little exegesis: Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan have both won the Nobel Prize; Haruki Marukami has become a worldwide sensation; and Korean writers Hwang Sok-young and Kim Young-ha transformed global literary culture in the early twentieth century. The literatures of “East Asia” have reached heights of unseen prominence in the Western literary world. This recent recognition of East Asian literature in the West has provided momentum for the inclusion of East Asia in the canon of world literature.

While the recognition of East Asian literature in both the global literary market and scholarly communities is unprecedented, its resulting canonization remains problematic. In The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Shorter Third Edition (2013), for example, Chinese and Japanese literatures feature heavily, yet Korean literature is almost entirely absent and there is no mention of any of the diasporic literatures of East Asia. These absences could be due to the limitations of space and the constraints of undergraduate coursework, or perhaps the inclusion of little known or unrecognized East Asian literary texts might be seen as risky. Regardless, this case of The Norton Anthology illustrates the underlying tension between regional or national literatures and world literature and between literary production and commodification.

In this inaugural moment for the journal, this special issue thus seeks to illuminate the gap between the literary production of East Asia and the canon of world literature. This issue aims to rethink the relation between the two entities of East Asia and world literature from a postcolonial perspective, rather than from some rarified global position upon the local. The essays contained within this issue ask: How does the local respond to the forces of globalization? Alongside continuing and newfound literary interest in East Asia emerge new delineations of nation, citizen, history, memory, and ecology and new subjects such as the nonhuman, super human, and posthuman. With surging interest in the literary texts of East Asia in the West, this special issue of Symposium attempts to address the following questions placed outside or beyond the East–West binary and the traditional sense of world literature: How is East Asia (re)shaping world literature? And, conversely, how is world literature (re)shaping East Asia? More specifically, how do East Asian writers translate local culture and memory into a creative language of imagination in contact with transnational cultural politics and practices? When encountering the “unknown” outside native cultural and historical boundaries, how do they imagine this anxiety and navigate nascent subjects and issues and unfamiliar cultural practices or forms?

The implications of these crucial questions, not yet fully examined by literary scholars and critics of East Asian literature and culture, are twofold in the context of this special issue. One lies at the disciplinary level, where these questions rethink East Asian literature's relation to, and place in, world literature. The second concerns the conceptual issues of production, reception, perception, translation, and circulation of East Asian literature in both the transregional and transnational literary worlds. The following five essays engage with these questions, while each employing a unique disciplinary approach. At the explicit level, this special issue offers us the opportunity to reimagine East Asian literature and features a variety of literary texts from the premodern era to the twenty-first century. At the same time, this issue allows us to re-envisage scholarship focused on texts produced, circulated, and translated in and through East Asia. Meanwhile, at the implicit level, these essays lead us to reconsider critically the concept of world literature and its politics in relation to East Asia.

Karen Thornber's essay, “Neglected Texts, Trajectories, and Communities: Reshaping World Literature and East Asia,” engages critically the disciplinary discourse of world literature. Thornber tackles rigorously and evidentially the existing landscape of world literature and, consequently, its practice of inclusion and exclusion of various East Asian literatures. Thornber's idea of the “paradoxical contrast” between East Asia's global reputation and the field's political exclusion of East Asian literature is particularly notable. Furthermore, her idea of the paradoxical contrast extends to the level at which East Asia's lack of presence within the domain of world literature is prominent not only in Western literary practice, but also in the East's literary practice. Often, one assumes too quickly a postcolonialist or binary position in the relationship between the West and the East. Thornber effortlessly eschews this trap of conventional division by providing multiple sets of evidence of the exclusion of East Asian literature within Asia itself. In the essay's second half, the author proffers two fascinating “case studies” of widely circulated East Asian texts heretofore absent from the canon of world literature: the thirteenth-century Mongolian The Secret History of the Mongols and the twentieth-century Korean writer Yi Ch’ŏngjun's novel Your Paradise (1976) on the Sorokdo leprosarium. Through the example of these texts, Thornber sounds a noble call for greater humility and collaboration in the field of world literature.

Charlotte Eubanks's essay, “Sutras as a Genre of World Literature: Thoughts on Translation, Translatio, and Poetry as Movement,” illustrates the extended notion of world literature envisioned by Thornber and traces a long, complex lineage of Buddhist sutras in translation. World literature, claims Eubanks, “must move.” Discussing a variety of sutras, ranging from the Mahayana sutras of the classical Indian subcontinent, including the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, to the Beat sutras of Allen Ginsberg, Eubanks makes the important claim that sutras not only functioned as a genre of world literature (before the invention of the contemporary notion of “world literature”), but they also continued to “move” or “transmit” their meanings throughout their expansive linguistic and cultural trajectories across different times and spaces. Shedding light on the discrepancies between the different versions of the Mahayana sutras or contemporary American poet Ginsberg's poetic translation of the Buddhist symbol of the lotus into a sunflower, her essay presents sutras as postmodern, transtemporal, and transcultural. This invigorating reconceptualization of sutras challenges the conventional idea that sutras, or any premodern written texts, are “static,” “stable,” or “anchored.” In this light, Eubanks makes the important argument that sutras are a world site of production and practice of episteme and that the inclusion of sutras will expand the canon of world literature and, to borrow Thornber's words, “scholarly discourses” on world literature.

In “Dislocating Language into Meaning: Difficult Anglophone Poetry and Chinese Poetics in Translation—Toward a Culturally Translatable Li Shangyin,” Lucas Klein confronts the poetics of difficulty in translation. Beginning with the indefatigable Ezra Pound, Klein probes the history of Chinese poetry in English translation and demonstrates how Chinese-in-translation came both to influence and engender notions of difficulty in modern English-language poetics. This difficulty, Klein argues, derives from Pound's impact on the poetics of parataxis; Pound's “ideogrammic” method, borne out in his Cathay, transformed the way English-language poetics articulates the “internal, autonomous meaning of a new sentence” (Perelman 61) in relation to the sentences that embed it. Having elucidated this relationship between Chinese poetry in translation and the poetics of difficulty in English, the author moves on to engage the translation of the late Tang poet Li Shangyin (813–858 CE), regarded generally as one of the most difficult poets of the Tang (618–907 CE). In these translations of Li Shangyin, Klein presents the possibility of a reflexively informative difficulty between premodern Chinese poetry and contemporary poetics, inscribing the translation of premodern Chinese interlinear commentary upon the body of his English poem. This new translational form, Klein argues, precipitates a more accurate representation of Li Shangyin's difficulty and therefore properly exhibits the potential of world literature's reflexive impact on cultural history.

If Eubanks's and Klein's essays present illustrations of how premodern East Asian literature challenges the canonical notion of world literature, the two final essays introduce us to contemporary East Asian literature. In his essay, “Imag(in)ing War Trauma in Sakaguchi Ango's ‘The Idiot’ and Ōe Kenzaburō's ‘Prize Stock,’” David Stahl shows how visual images serve to illustrate war trauma in two disparate Japanese literary narratives. Stahl combines the “imagining” and “imaging” of Walter Davis's “vital image,” revealing the interwoven relationships between individual and collective bodies and between interpersonal and national violence. Stahl's employment of trauma and visual theories presents non-Japanese readers with alternate ways to receive and perceive Japanese literature, while also reframing the production and circulation of Japanese literary discourse in a global literary world.

The final essay of this special issue features a relatively new genre in humanities scholarship: science fiction. Haerin Shin's essay, “Can Nonhuman Substrates Dream of Nirvana? Recuperating Subjectivity through Posthuman Spirituality in ‘Readymade Bodhisattva,’” also provides a unique view of East Asian literature by providing a close reading of Pak Sŏng-hwan's short story, “Readymade Bodhisattva.” By way of a deconstructive reading of the protagonist, a Buddhist robot-human who reached “Enlightenment,” and by illuminating the consequent conflicts between “it” and the institution of religion, Shin offers an alternative image of the posthuman subject in the age of what she calls, echoing Walter Benjamin, “technological reproducibility.” Shin emphasizes that Pak's creation of the robot does not endorse the perfect production of the human, which is void of consciousness, but rather illuminates the flawed, anomalous vision of the posthuman subject. In this way, Shin's essay shows us how the global reception of East Asian literature must be reformulated, beyond the traditional scope of nation, state, citizen, or modernity, and encourages us to consider the ontological circulation of scholarship and cultural discourse. By the same token, her essay exemplifies, once again, the problematics of world literature's canonicity.

All five essays introduce us to literary texts that heretofore were not widely known in the fields of East Asian literary studies and world literature. Each essay, in its own critical language and philosophy of the relations of literature and history and of literature and the human, contextualizes a critical nexus with which to engage world literature: the politics of inclusion and exclusion, issues of translation and reception, the marginalization of theoretical and conceptual methodologies, and even the anthropocentric ontology of world literature. This special issue, in this way, helps us to realize the diversity of East Asian literature and to envision the heterogeneity of its form and content.

Notes on contributors

Meera Lee is Assistant Professor of Asian/Asian American Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. Her work has appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Tamkang Review. Her article on Korean cinema is forthcoming from positions: asia critique.

Edwin Van Bibber-Orr is Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. Van Bibber-Orr has received a Fulbright Scholar grant to complete his monograph on the Song woman poet Zhu Shuzhen. A book chapter, “Alcoholism and Song Literati,” is forthcoming in the edited volume Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China.