The Making Of Barbarians

Download or read book The Making of Barbarians written by Haun Saussy and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-12-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking account of translation and identity in the Chinese literary tradition before 1850—with important ramifications for today Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China. The Making of Barbarians offers an account of world literature in which China, as center, produces its own margins. Here Sinologist and comparatist Haun Saussy investigates the meanings of literary translation, adaptation, and appropriation on the boundaries of China long before it came into sustained contact with the West. When scholars talk about comparative literature in Asia, they tend to focus on translation between European languages and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as practiced since about 1900. In contrast, Saussy focuses on the period before 1850, when the translation of foreign works into Chinese was rare because Chinese literary tradition overshadowed those around it. The Making of Barbarians looks closely at literary works that were translated into Chinese from foreign languages or resulted from contact with alien peoples. The book explores why translation was such an undervalued practice in premodern China, and how this vast and prestigious culture dealt with those outside it before a new group of foreigners—Europeans—appeared on the horizon.

Download or read book Barbarians at the Wall written by John Man and published by Bantam Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Fear of Barbarians written by Tzvetan Todorov and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between Western democracies and Islam, rarely entirely comfortable, has in recent years become increasingly tense. A growing immigrant population and worries about cultural and political assimilation—exacerbated by terrorist attacks in the United States, Europe, and around the world—have provoked reams of commentary from all parts of the political spectrum, a frustrating majority of it hyperbolic or even hysterical. In The Fear of Barbarians, the celebrated intellectual Tzvetan Todorov offers a corrective: a reasoned and often highly personal analysis of the problem, rooted in Enlightenment values yet open to the claims of cultural difference. Drawing on history, anthropology, and politics, and bringing to bear examples ranging from the murder of Theo van Gogh to the French ban on headscarves, Todorov argues that the West must overcome its fear of Islam if it is to avoid betraying the values it claims to protect. True freedom, Todorov explains, requires us to strike a delicate balance between protecting and imposing cultural values, acknowledging the primacy of the law, and yet strenuously protecting minority views that do not interfere with its aims. Adding force to Todorov's arguments is his own experience as a native of communist Bulgaria: his admiration of French civic identity—and Western freedom—is vigorous but non-nativist, an inclusive vision whose very flexibility is its core strength. The record of a penetrating mind grappling with a complicated, multifaceted problem, The Fear of Barbarians is a powerful, important book—a call, not to arms, but to thought.

Download or read book Barbarian's Touch written by Ruby Dixon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The next novel in the Ice Planet Barbarians series, an international publishing phenomenon—now in a special print edition with a bonus new epilogue! Lila has never been more frightened in her life, but when Rokan appears, everything changes. When I wake up on the ice planet, I’m scared of everything: This place is cold, silent, and the locals look more like blue devils than aliens. To make matters worse, one of the strangers decides I’m going to be his girlfriend and kidnaps me away from my sister. I’m completely and utterly alone. What’s a girl to do? Well, this girl escapes. Of course, that means I go from the frying pan into the fire, and my situation gets even more dangerous. Just when I have no hope left, a new hero shows up. Sure, he’s blue, horned, and has a tail. He’s also fierce, protective, makes me purr...and thinks I'm perfect. But is what we have real or just a mating instinct?

Download or read book Waiting for the Barbarians written by J. M. Coetzee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. His latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to to bring J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen.

Download or read book Barbarian's Prize written by Ruby Dixon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The next novel in the international publishing phenomenon the Ice Planet Barbarians series, now in a special print edition with a bonus original novella! Tiffany doesn’t care about all the attention she’s getting from the alien men, but there is one particular hunter she can see herself with—if only she can find a way to move forward from the past. . . . It’s hard being the most popular girl on the ice planet. The alien men are falling all over themselves to impress me in the hopes that I’ll take them to my furs. But they don’t know my secrets. And they don’t realize that behind my smile, I just wish they’d take their courting presents and their competitions for my affection and go away. I want to be left alone. But on a planet where women are a scarcity, that won’t be happening. If I had to choose a mate . . . it’d be someone with a gorgeous blue body, big horns, and the most intense gaze ever. Someone who knows the truth of what happened to me and why I don’t like attention. Patient, handsome Salukh knows my secrets. He knows why I have nightmares and why I don’t trust anyone. He’s willing to let me “experiment” with him. I can use him. Take what I need from him to work through my trauma. He’s been a good friend and the best shoulder to cry on. There’s one small problem. When it comes to us, he doesn’t just want to be my friend. He wants to be my forever. And day by day, he’s getting harder to resist. . . .

Download or read book Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China written by Haun Saussy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject"--these and other dualisms furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof. But what does this language of essential difference accomplish? The essays in this book are an attempt to cut short the recitation of differences and to answer this question. In six interpretive studies of China, the author examines the ways in which the networks of assumption and consensus that make communication possible within a discipline affect collective thinking about the object of study. Among other subjects, these essays offer a historical and historiographical introduction to the problem of comparison and deal with translation, religious proselytization, semiotics, linguistics, cultural bilingualism, writing systems, the career of postmodernism in China, and the role of China as an imaginary model for postmodernity in the West. Against the reigning simplifications, these essays seek to restore the interpretation of China to the complexity and impurity of the historical situations in which it is always caught. The chief goal of the essays in this book is not to expose errors in interpreting China but to use these misunderstandings as a basis for devising better methodologies for comparative studies.