An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China

UC Irvine FlashPoints Title An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cn362pp ISBN 978-0-8101-3162-0 Author Miller, J. Hillis Publication Date 2015-10-13 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California An Innocent Abroad The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi- tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit- erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit- erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor A complete list of titles begins on p. 306. An Innocent Abroad Lectures in China J. Hillis Miller northwestern university press | evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Foreword copyright © 2015 by Fredric Jameson. Published 2015. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Miller, J. Hillis (Joseph Hillis), 1928– author. [Speeches. Selections.] An innocent abroad : lectures in China / J. Hillis Miller. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 8101- 3162- 0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 8101- 3258- 0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 8101- 3163- 7 (ebook) 1. Criticism. 2. Literature— Study and teaching. 3. Literature and globalization. I. Title. II. Series: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) PN85.M485 2015 801.95— dc23 2015029410 For Shen Dan, Wang Fengzhen, Wang Ning, and Richard Terdiman Contents Acknowledgments ix Editor’s Note xvii Richard Terdiman Foreword xxi Fredric Jameson Introduction xxv 1. The Role of Theory in the Development of Literary Studies in the United States 3 2. Black Holes in the Internet Galaxy: New Trends in Literary Study in the United States 23 3. Effects of Globalization on Literary Study 41 4. Will Literary Study Survive the Globalization of the University and the New Regime of Telecommunications? 57 5. Promises, Promises: Speech Act Theory, Literary Theory, and Politico-Economic Theory in Marx and de Man 71 6. On the Authority of Literature 87 7. The (Language) Crisis of Comparative Literature 107 8. The Indigene and the Cybersurfer 127 9. “Material Interests”: Modernist English Literature as Critique of Global Capitalism 157 10. Who’s Afraid of Globalization? 177 11. A Comparison of Literary Studies in the United States and China 189 12. Globalization and World Literature 209 13. Cold Heaven, Cold Comfort: Should We Read or Teach Literature Now? 227 14. Mixed Media Forever: The Internet as Spectacle; or, The Digital Transformation of Literary Studies 243 15. Literature Matters Today 257 Appendix: J. Hillis Miller in China (1988– 2012) 269 Prepared by Guo Yanjuan Notes 275 Index 299 Acknowledgments First, let me warmly and gratefully thank Richard Terdiman, my col- league in the University of California multicampus system, for suggest- ing that I contribute a book to the FlashPoints series, now published by Northwestern University Press. He has waited patiently for a good many years for me to get around to doing this book, only nudging me politely now and then to ask me to get on with it, as more and more “lectures in China” have accumulated. This book would never have appeared without his instigation. It is a great honor for me to have this book appear under such distinguished auspices. My heartfelt gratitude goes to all those in China who have been so kind and courteous to me and have taken such good care of me in China over the years. I have warm feelings for them all, not only the senior scholars who have been my hosts but also the graduate students and young faculty who were given the somewhat thankless job of ac- companying me from one place to another. I have been honored and treated courteously in every possible way in China, not only by being given the best bits (among them, fish eyes, boiled river-turtle shells, and other strange delicacies) at feasts in my honor but also by having been awarded many honorary guest professorships (I count ten over the years, plus an honorary professorship at Peking University all the way back in 1994). I have also been honored by being repeatedly interviewed by journalists for publications like the Literature and Art Gazette; none of those interviews have been included in this book, but they were often ix x ❘ Acknowledgments intellectually exigent dialogues in which I was asked penetrating and informed questions. First I thank Wang Fengzhen, now retired from the Institute of For- eign Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, whom I first met when he was a visiting scholar at Irvine, before I ever visited China. Then must come Shen Dan, now Changjiang Professor of En- glish Language and Literature at Peking University. She is an interna- tionally renowned scholar in narratology. I met her on my first visit to China, in 1988. Wang Fengzhen and Shen Dan are my oldest friends in China. Next I thank Wang Ning of Tsinghua University, a distinguished theorist with an international reputation, who has arranged so many invitations for me, not only at his own university or universities but also at conferences in many places in China. After them comes Guo Rong, now an old friend, who I am told on good authority is one of my best translators. Then Guo Yanjuan, the author of a dissertation in Chinese on my work. She helped me immeasurably with the putting together of this book (for example, by compiling the appendix, which condenses much factual information about my lectures in China that I never would have been able to recover or discover for myself). Guo Rong and Guo Yanjuan are kindly collaborating to prepare a Chinese version of this book to be published by Nanjing University Press. That is a great honor for me. I thank finally a list, by no means complete, of other scholars, whose names are given in no particular order. Their names are the tip of an iceberg, as we say, since I have kept no comprehensive record over the years. These scholars have been kind and hospitable to me— for example, by inviting me to lecture, or by interviewing me, or by serving as my host, or by sponsoring me for a guest professorship appointment, or by translating one or more of my lectures or essays, or by writing a dissertation on my work, or by coming to Irvine as a visiting fellow under my sponsorship: Huimin Jin, Xia Yanhua, Xu Qin (Daniel), Tao Jiajun, Chen Aimin, Ning Yizhong, Sheng Anfeng, Sheng Ning, Lu Xiaohong, Li Yuan, Li Zuolin, Chen Yongguo, Zhang Yifan, Huang Dexian, Xuan Gong, Xialin Ding, Ming Don Gu, Shaobo Xie, Wang Yue, and Xiao- ming Yi. I have watched with pleasure and admiration the professional development of these friends and colleagues. My association with them has been an important part of my own professional life since 1988. I gratefully acknowledge some of the previous publication of versions of many of the lectures in this book. The manuscripts of many of the lectures have long since disappeared. The lectures I actually gave Acknowledgments ❘ xi were often abbreviated versions of essays that were published later on, and all have been revised for this book— often, for example, with com- ments from the present included within brackets. For this book, I used the actual lectures I gave, whenever I still had them, but in some cases I have had to use the published versions, and these are usually somewhat longer than the original lectures. The appendix lists the dates and locations in China where the fifteen lectures were delivered before they became the essays in this book. The lecture that became chapter 1 was originally presented at a ple- nary meeting, held in Beijing in May 1988, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It was published three years later in David Easton and Corinne S. Schelling, eds., Divided Knowledge: Across Disciplines, Across Cultures (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991), 118– 38. The version used in the present volume is a revised version of the original lecture as it appeared in that book. The lecture that became chapter 2 was originally presented in 1994 to the Institute of Foreign Literature at the Chinese Academy of So- cial Sciences, for publication in the institute’s journal. The lecture was dedicated to the memory of William (Bill) Readings, a brilliant young Oxford- trained theorist and literary critic and associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Montreal who had died in a commuter plane crash in Indiana on 31 October 1994.

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