Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Introduction: Entering the Language Continuum

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Chinese Language in European Texts

Part of the book series: Chinese Literature and Culture in the World ((CLCW))

  • 301 Accesses

Abstract

Scholars rarely examine the causes of the well-known European fascination with Chinese writing and its accompanying ideographic and universalist mythology. Luca sets out to investigate them in a chronological study that focuses on both Chinese master-texts and less visited works in several languages, and discusses contexts from classical, medieval, and early modern times up to 1615. In this sense, he identifies a rhetorical continuum uniting the land of the Seres, Cathay, and China in a tropology of silence, vision, and writing. Setting the exploration of this continuum as the aim of The Chinese Language in European Texts: The Early Period, the Introduction concludes by circumscribing the specificity of the relevant rhetorical dynamics into three different periods (corresponding to the three main chapters of the book).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Most of the information reviewed in this paragraph, as well as many extra details, can be found in two postings by Victor Mair and the commentaries they triggered on the Language Log blog, available online at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=881 and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=969. While some sites reporting on this story and accessed in late 2008 and early 2009 seem now to be down, many comments and discussions are still readily accessible at the time of this writing (October 2013); this is also the case for articles in several newspapers in Australia, Canada, Germany, UK, etc.

  2. 2.

    Emma Martinell Gifre, Mar Cruz Piñol, and Rosa Ribas Moliné, eds., Corpus de testimonios de convivencia lingüística: ss. XII–XVIII (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2000); Emma Martinell Gifre and Mar Cruz Piñol, eds., La conciencia lingüística en Europa: Testimonios de situaciones de convivencia de lenguas, ss. XII–XVIII (Barcelona: PPU, 1996).

  3. 3.

    Rüdiger Schreyer, The European Discovery of Chinese (1550–1615) or The Mystery of Chinese Unveiled (Amsterdam: Stichting Neerlandistiek VU, 1992).

  4. 4.

    An earlier series of salvoes was shot in the 1930s and 1940s and involved primarily H. G. Creel—“On the Nature of Chinese Ideography,” T’oung Pao 32 (1936): 85–161, and “On the Ideographic Element in Ancient Chinese,” T’oung Pao 34 (1938): 265–94—and Peter A. Boodberg—“Some Proleptical Remarks on the Evolution of Archaic Chinese,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 (1937): 329–72, and “‘Ideography’ or Iconolatry?,” T’oung Pao 35 (1940): 266–88; see also Paul Pelliot, “Brèves remarques sur le phonétisme dans l’écriture chinoise,” T’oung Pao 32 (1936): 162–66. Other significant references include: George A. Kennedy, “The Monosyllabic Myth,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 71, no. 3 (1951): 161–66; Homer H. Dubs, “On the Supposed Monosyllabic Myth,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 72, no. 2 (1952): 82–83; John DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (1950; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1972), esp. 147–65, and The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1984); Jacques Gernet, “La Chine: aspects et fonctions psychologiques de l’écriture,” in L’intelligence de la Chine: Le social et le mental (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 361–79; Léon Vandermeersch, Le nouveau monde sinisé (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 127–51, and “La langue graphique chinoise,” in Études sinologiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 233–75; J. Marshall Unger, “The Very Idea: The Notion of Ideogram in China and Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 45, no. 4 (1990): 391–411, “Communications to the Editor,” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 4 (1993): 949–54, and Ideogram:Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004); Chad Hansen, “Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas,” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (1993): 373–99; William G. Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1994); Françoise Bottéro, Review of The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System, by William G. Boltz, Journal of the American Oriental Society 116, no. 3 (1996): 574–77; Jean Levi, Review of Études sinologiques, by Léon Vandermeersch, L’Homme 36, no. 137 (1996): 232–33; Viviane Alleton, “Regards actuels sur l’écriture chinoise,” in Paroles à dire, paroles à écrire. Inde, Chine, Japon, ed. Viviane Alleton (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1997), 185–207, and L’écriture chinoise: Le défi de la modernité (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008), 207–26; Redouane Djamouri, “Écriture et langue dans les inscriptions chinoises archaïques (XIVe-XIe siècle avant notre ère),” in Alleton, Paroles à dire, 224–29, 235–36; Luciana Bressan, “Sulla mitizzazione della scrittura cinese,” Culture: Annali dell’Istituto di lingue della Facoltà di scienze politiche dell’Università degli studi di Milano 10 (1996): 283–323; Ming Dong Gu, “Reconceptualizing the Linguistic Divide: Chinese and Western Theories of the Written Sign,” Comparative Literature Studies 37, no. 2 (2000): 101–24; Roy Harris, Rethinking Writing (London: Continuum, 2001), esp. 138–60; Françoise Bottéro and Redouane Djamouri, eds., Écriture chinoise: Données, usages et représentations (Paris: EHESS-CRLAO, 2006); Marco Caboara, Review of Les deux raisons de la pensée chinoise: Divination et idéographie, by Léon Vandermeersch, Monumenta Serica 63, no. 1 (2015): 195–201. Recent reviews are David B. Lurie, “Language, Writing, and Disciplinarity in the Critique of the ‘Ideographic Myth’: Some Proleptical Remarks,” Language & Communication 26 (2006): 250–69; Edward McDonald, “Getting over the Walls of Discourse: ‘Character Fetishization’ in Chinese Studies,” The Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 4 (2009): 1189–1213; David Prager Branner, “Phonology in the Chinese Script and Its Relationship to Early Chinese Literacy,” in Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar, ed. Li Feng and David Prager Branner (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 87–94.

  5. 5.

    Liselotte Dieckmann, “Renaissance Hieroglyphics,” Comparative Literature 9, no. 4 (1957): 308–21; Erik Iversen, “Hieroglyphic Studies of the Renaissance,” The Burlington Magazine 100, no. 658 (1958): 15–21, and The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (1961; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 57–87; Madeleine V. David, Le Débat sur les écritures et l’hiéroglyphe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1965), esp. 11–42; Frances Yates, Selected Works, III: The Art of Memory (1966; repr., London: Routledge, 1999); Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Mythe et langage au seizième siècle (Bordeaux: Ducros, 1970); Jean Céard, “De Babel à la Pentecôte: la transformation du mythe de la confusion des langues au XVIe siècle,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 42, no. 3 (1980): 577–94; Marie-Luce Demonet, Les Voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance, 1480–1580 (Paris: H. Champion, 1992); Nicholas Hudson, Writing and European Thought, 1600–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–54; Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), and Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), “Nebrija in the New World. The Question of the Letter, the Colonization of American Languages, and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition,” L’Homme 32, nos. 122–124 (1992): 185–207, and “Gnosis, Colonialism and Cultures of Scholarship,” in Cultures of Scholarship, ed. S. C. Humphreys (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 311–38; David B. Paxman, Voyage into Language: Space and the Linguistic Encounter, 1500–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “How Maya Hieroglyphs Got Their Name: Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western Grammatology since the Fifteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152, no. 1 (2008): 1–68; James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 33–64.

  6. 6.

    Apart from the texts already listed in note 4 above, mention should be made also of: Jonathan Chaves, “‘Increasingly We Meet Only Ourselves’: Thoughts on the Chinese Literature. Roundtable at the AAS Meeting, April 7, 1990,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991): 77–82, and “Soul and Reason in Literary Criticism: Deconstructing the Deconstructionists,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no. 4 (2002): 828–35; David Palumbo-Liu, “The Utopias of Discourse: On the Impossibility of Chinese Comparative Literature,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 14 (1992): 165–76; Mary S. Erbaugh et al., “The Ideographic Myth and Its Impact on Asian Studies, Part One,” Abstracts of the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, http://aas2.asian-studies.org/absts/1995abst/inter/inter97.htm, “How the Ideographic Myth Alienates Asian Studies from Psychology and Linguistics,” in Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing, ed. Mary S. Erbaugh (Columbus, OH: National East Asian Languages Resource Center, The Ohio State University, 2002), 21–51, and “Ideograph as Other in Poststructuralist Literary Theory,” in Erbaugh, Difficult Characters, 205–24; Joseph W. Esherick, “Cherishing Sources from Afar,” Modern China 24, no. 2 (1998): 135–61; James L. Hevia, “Postpolemical Historiography: A Response to Joseph W. Esherick,” Modern China 24, no. 3 (1998): 319–27; Christopher Leigh Connery, The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 1–19; Martin Kern, Review of The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China, by Christopher Leigh Connery, China Review International 7, no. 2 (2000): 420–25; Hans Kuijper, “Is Sinology a Science?,” China Report 36, no. 3 (2000): 331–54.

  7. 7.

    Schreyer, European Discovery of Chinese, 14.

  8. 8.

    The exact role played by Trigault in relation to Ricci’s text has been discussed many times. See T. N. Foss, “Nicholas Trigault, S.J.—Amanuensis or Propagandist? The Rôle of the Editor of Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella Cina,” in Supplement to International Symposium on Chinese-Western Cultural Interchange in Commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of the Arrival of Matteo Ricci, S.J. in China (Taipei: Fu Jen University Press, 1983), 1–94; Gaetano Ricciardolo, “L’autenticità dei commentari dalla Cina di P. Matteo Ricci S.I.,” Rivista degli studi orientali 73, nos. 1–4 (1999): 165–83; Luca Fezzi, “Osservazioni sul De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Iesu di Nicolas Trigault,” Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 35, no. 3 (2000): 541–66; Jacques Gernet, “Pour une traduction en anglais des Mémoires de Matteo Ricci,” in A Life Journey to the East: Sinological Studies in Memory of Giuliano Bertuccioli (1923–2001), ed. Antonino Forte and Federico Masini (Kyoto: Scuola Italiana di Studi sull’Asia Orientale, 2002): 149–64, and “Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella Cina de Matteo Ricci (1609) et les remaniements de sa traduction latine (1615),” Comptes-rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 147, no. 1 (2003): 61–84. For a sophisticated discussion on collective authorship with regard to the text, see Antonella Romano, “Un siècle de voyages missionnaires dans la Chine des derniers Ming,” Estudis: Revista de historia moderna 39 (2013): 80–84. Trigault himself speaks of having “reduced” Ricci’s work into a “historical narrative”; see Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, Histoire de l’expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine, 1582–1610, trans. David Floris de Ricquebourg-Trigault, ed. Georges Bessière (Bruxelles: Desclée De Brouwer, 1978), 69. See also note 62 to Chap. 4. For the influence of the De Christiana expeditione..., see, for instance, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, ed. and trans. Louis J. Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953), xix; David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Wiesbaden: Fritz Steiner, 1985), 48; Ashley Eva Millar, “Your Beggarly Commerce! Enlightenment European Views of the China Trade,” in Encountering Otherness. Diversities and Transcultural Experiences in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Guido Abbattista (Trieste: EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2011), 211.

  9. 9.

    Schreyer, European Discovery of Chinese; Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic in Traditional China, vol. 7, pt. 1, of Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8–19, and “John Webb and the Early History of the Study of the Classical Chinese Language in the West,” in Europe Studies China: Papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology, ed. Ming Wilson and John Cayley (London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1995), 297–338; Dolors Folch i Fornesa, “¿Todos los chinos sabían leer y escribir? Escritura, lengua y educación china en los textos españoles del XVI,” in Lenguas de Asia Oriental, estudios lingüísticos y discursivos, ed. María Amparo Montaner Montava and María Querol Bataller (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2010), 119–32.

  10. 10.

    Paul Zumthor, “The Medieval Travel Narrative,” trans. Catherine Peebles, New Literary History 25, no. 4 (1994): 812; Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 194–97, and “Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East,” in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 76; Eco, Serendipities, 52–75; Michel Mollat, Les explorateurs du XIIIe au XVIe siècle: Premiers regards sur des mondes nouveaux (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1984), 115–31; Jacques Le Goff, “The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oneiric Horizon,” in Time, Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 191; Bernard Ribemont, “L’inconnu géographique des encyclopédies médiévales,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales 3 (1997): 101–3. However, see also Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 337–39.

  11. 11.

    Viviane Alleton, “L’oubli de la langue et l’‘invention de l’écriture chinoise en Europe’”, Études Chinoises 13, nos. 1–2 (1994): 259–82; Elena Losada Soler, “Los tres océanos de los portugueses: el abanico de la alteridad,” in Martinell Gifre and Cruz Piñol, Conciencia lingüística en Europa, 221–30, and “La concreción de dos espacios míticos: Catay y China. Expediciones portuguesas entre 1513 y 1640,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 43 (1991–1992): 347–61; Emanuele Raini, “L’incubo di una lingua incomprensibile,” Sulla via del Catai 7, no. 9 (2014): 29–40.

  12. 12.

    Robert A. Hall, Jr., “Linguistic Theory in the Italian Renaissance,” Language 12, no. 2 (1936–1938): 96–107; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1994), esp. 38–50; Herbert J. Izzo, “Phonetics in 16th-Century Italy: Giorgio Bartoli and John David Rhys,” in The History of Linguistics in Italy, ed. Paolo Ramat, Hans-Josef Niederehe, and E. F. K. Koerner (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986), 121–46; D. R. Woolf, “Speech, Text, and Time: The Sense of Hearing and the Sense of the Past in Renaissance England,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 18, no. 2 (1986): 159–93; Anne Ferry, The Art of Naming (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 14–39; Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), esp. 110–46; Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. 183–229; Walter D. Mignolo, “On the Colonization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theories of Writing and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 2 (1992): 301–30; Ana Paula Laborinho, “The Role of Language in Evangelization Strategy,” Macau, special issue (1994): 108–14; Hudson, Writing and European Thought, esp. 1–31; Marie-Luce Demonet, “Les origines comparées de l’écriture et de la parole à la Renaissance,” in Les Origines du langage, ed. Olivier Pot (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 165–82; Cordula Neis, “European Conceptions of Writing from the Renaissance to the Eighteenth Century,” in History of Linguistics 2008: Selected Papers from the Eleventh International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHOLS XI), 28 August–2 September 2008, Potsdam, ed. Gerda Hassler and Gesina Volkmann (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 169–86.

  13. 13.

    For some references, see Chap. 2, note 96.

  14. 14.

    Pedro Chirino, Relación de las Islas Filipinas… (Rome: Stefano Paolino, 1604), 34–41; see also 188–89; Relation of the Filipinas Islands and of What Has There Been Accomplished by the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, in The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, ed. Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, 55 vols., trans. Frederic W. Morrison and Emma Helen Blair (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1903–1909), 12:235–40 (see also 13:200–3); cf. History of the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus, ed. Jaume Gorriz i Abella, trans. José S. Arcilla, 2 vols. (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2010), 2:34–41 (see also 2:295–97).

  15. 15.

    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 138; Nicolas Fréret, “Réflexions sur les principes généraux de l’art d’écrire, et en particulier sur les fondemens de l’écriture chinoise,” Mémoires de littérature tirés des registres de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles lettres. Depuis l’année M. DCCXVIII. jusques & compris l’année M. DCCXXV 6 (1729): 619. See Alleton, “L’oubli,” 276; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 79.

  16. 16.

    On this and related issues, see Pascale Girard, “Du Cathay à la Chine: Variations pour voyageurs et erudits,” in Découvertes et explorateurs, ed. Association “Histoire au présent (Paris, France),” Maison des pays ibériques, and Université Michel de Montaigne–Bordeaux III (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994): 57–65; Michèle Guéret-Laferté, “Le voyageur et le géographe. L’insertion de la relation de voyage de Guillaume de Rubrouck dans l’Opus majus de Roger Bacon,” in “La géographie au Moyen Âge. Espaces pensés, espaces vécus, espaces rêvés,” supplement, Perspectives médiévales 24 (1998): 82.

  17. 17.

    In later times, such maps also become, of course, actual physical objects. From the quite extensive scholarship on monsters in classical and medieval times, see, for instance: Wittkower, “Marvels”; John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Claude-Claire Kappler, Monstres, démons, et merveilles à la fin du Moyen Age, new rev. ed. (Paris: Payot, 1999); Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger, eds., Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002); Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Chet Van Duzer, “Hic Sunt Dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters,” The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 387–436.

  18. 18.

    Eco, Serendipities, 54.

  19. 19.

    On issues of genre, context of production, textual status, circulation, and similar matters regarding China-related texts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see, for instance, Manel Ollé, “La invención de China: Mitos y escenarios de la imagen ibérica de China en el siglo XVI,” Revista española del Pacífico 8 (1998): 541–68; Beatriz Moncó, “Entre la imagen y la realidad: los viajes a China de Miguel de Loarca y Adriano de las Cortes,” Revista española del Pacífico 8 (1998): 581–82, and “The China of the Jesuits: Travels and Experiences of Diego de Pantoja and Adriano de las Cortes,” Culture & History Digital Journal 1, no. 2 (2012): 10–11, http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2012.m101.

  20. 20.

    Next to quite a few of the texts mentioned in note 5 above, other important references here include: James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975); Jonathan Cohen, “On the Project of a Universal Character,” Mind, n.s., 63, no. 249 (1954): 49–63; Benjamin DeMott, “Comenius and the Real Character in England,” PMLA 70, no. 5 (1955): 1068–81; Paul Cornelius, Languages in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages (Geneva: Droz, 1965); Edwin J. Van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,” The American Historical Review 76, no. 2 (1971): 358–85; Margreta De Grazia, “The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 41, no. 2 (1980): 319–29; John Bold, “John Webb: Composite Capitals and the Chinese Language,” Oxford Art Journal 4, no. 1 (1981): 9–17; Michael T. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981): 519–38; Mungello, Curious Land, 174–207; Thomas C. Singer, “Hieroglyphs, Real Characters, and the Idea of Natural Language in English Seventeenth-Century Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 1 (1989): 49–70; Jean-François Maillard, “Un avatar de la traduction: l’idéal d’une langue universelle à la Renaissance,” in Traduction et traducteurs au Moyen Âge, ed. Geneviève Contamine (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1989), 333–48; Roberto Pellerey, “La Cina e il Nuovo Mondo. Il mito dell’ideografia nella lingua delle Indie,” Belfagor 47, no. 5 (1992): 507–22; Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 249–65; Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 126–42; Julie Candler Hayes, “Look but Don’t Read: Chinese Characters and the Translating Drive from John Wilkins to Peter Greenaway,” Modern Language Quarterly 60, no. 3 (1999): 353–77; David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Thijs Weststeijn, “From Hieroglyphs to Universal Characters: Pictography in the Early Modern Netherlands,” Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 61, no. 1 (2011): 238–81.

  21. 21.

    Derrida, Grammatology, 80; John Cayley and Yang Lian, “Hallucination and Coherence,” positions: east Asia cultures critique 10, no. 3 (2002): 775–76 and passim.

  22. 22.

    Cordell D. K. Yee, “Discourse on Ideogrammic Method: Epistemology and Pound’s Poetics,” American Literature 59, no. 2 (1987): 242–56; Zhang Longxi, The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), and Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jiewei Cheng, “Derrida and Ideographic Poetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 35, no. 2 (1995): 134–44; Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: “Cathay,” Translation, and Imagism (London: Routledge, 1998); Stanley K. Abe, “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 169–92; Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), and “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté: The Surprises of Applied Structuralism,” in Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory, ed. Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003), 39–71; Rey Chow, “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 69–74, and “Reply,” PMLA 116, no. 3 (2001): 660; Arnold Bohm, “Letter to Editor,” PMLA 116, no. 3 (2001): 657–58; Henry Staten, “Letter to Editor,” PMLA 116, no. 3 (2001): 659–60; Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Cayley and Yang, “Hallucination and Coherence”; Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, eds. Sinographies: Writing China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei City, Taiwan

    Dinu Luca

Authors
  1. Dinu Luca
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2016 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Luca, D. (2016). Introduction: Entering the Language Continuum. In: The Chinese Language in European Texts. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50291-9_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation