NOTES Introduction 1. Dante Alighieri, Literature in the Vernacular (De Vulgari Eloquentia), trans. Sally Purcell (Manchester: Carcanet New Press Limited, 1981), 21–22. 2. Ibid., 27. 3. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Blackwell, 1995), 34. 4. Ibid., 45–46. 5. Dante Alighieri, Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 67. In his discussion, Anderson places great emphasis on “piracy,” which I have found rather problematic. The word “piracy” vividly evokes the speed and pervasiveness of the emergence of the vernacular and the spread of nationalism. But it also has negative connotations of forgery, of knowledge as property. Is Anderson implying that that all the language revolu- tions in other countries are illegitimate copies, while the European one is the only original? One can’t help but think of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the “original” and the “copies” in his well- known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Does the construction of the “original” and the “piracy” in Anderson’s paradigm also work to uphold the concept of authenticity, granting some kind of aura to the superior West, which in turn demands some ritualistic respect from the inferior “copies”? 8. In his article “Conjectures on World Literature” (in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast [New York: Verso, 2004], 148–162), Franco Moretti shows the findings of his ambitious research on the rise of the modern novel (roughly from 1750 to 1950) in four continents (Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa), more than twenty independent critical studies, as such: world literature was indeed a system—but a system of variations. While I agree with Moretti’s argument, readers will see that my vision of “system” differs considerably 142 Notes from Moretti’s political, economic, and scientific approach. As Emily Apter observes in her article “Literary World- Systems” (in Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch [The Modern Language Association of America, 2009], 44–60), Moretti drew heavily on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, for whom the world- system was market- driven with core centers of power, around which peripheral nations orbited. In his recent projects, The Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), an edited volume on the world history of the genre involving contributors from various national literatures, and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstracts for a Literary History (London and New York: Verso, 2005), Moretti fur- ther highlights the value of science (both natural science and social science) in his approach to understanding world literature. 9. Two major works in this category of “history of ideas” regarding the rise of the vernacular are Richard Foster Jones’s The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953) and Eric Blackall’s The Emergence of German as a Literary Language: 1770–1775 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 10. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in China, 1900–37 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 26. 11. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), 57. A perfect proof of this theory is Jacques Derrida’s recently published book Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), where he claims: “I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me. The monolingualism in which I draw my very breath is, for me, my element. Not a natural element, not the transparency of the ether, but an absolute Habitat” (1). What Derrida expresses here is obviously an experience he underwent with language that touched the innermost nexus of his existence. Although the struggle that Derrida had to come to terms with—“I only have one language; it is not mine”—was deeply connected with the “legacy of French in colonial Algeria,” the kind of obsessive and precarious emotional, linguistic, and existential condition that he explores and elaborates in his book is far more universal. See also Rey Chow’s interesting article “Reading Derrida on Being Monolingual,” New Literature History, vol. 39, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 217–31. 12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), 465. 13. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 74. 14. Nergis Erturk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpinar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy,” PMLA, vol. 123, (January 2008) no. 1: 41–56. 15. Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman,” in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Yang Hsien- yi and Gladys Yang (Norton, 1977), 10. 16. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford University Press, 1996), 29. Notes 143 17. Ernest Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 355. 18. Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 19. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 45. Also see, Apter, “Literary World- Systems.” 20. See Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 149. 21. See Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees. One The Language of Utopia 1. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. H.V.S. Ogden (Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1949), 29. 2. Ibid., 29. 3. Kang Youwei, Ta T’ung Shu: The One- World Philosophy of K’ang Yu- wei, trans. Laurence G. Thompson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1958), 99. 4. Ibid., 101. 5. Gerard Wegemer, “The City of God in Thomas More’s Utopia,” Renascence 44 (Winter 1992): 115–135; also see Zhang Longxi, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 167–173. 6. See Patrick Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: University of Columbia Press, 2004), 76. 7. Kang Youwei, 101. 8. Ibid.,101. 9. Charles Ferguson, “Diglossia,” Word 15 (1959): 325–40. 10. After Ferguson coined the term, “diglossia” became widely used in socio- linguistic literature and its meaning was further theorized and extended. The most important revision was provided by Joshua Fishman in his 1967 article, entitled “Bilingualism with and without diglossia, diglossia with and without bilingualism” (The Journal of Social Issue 23, 1967: 29–38). Defining the notion almost solely based on the principle of function, Fishman states that “diglos- sia” exists “not only in multilingual societies which officially recognize sev- eral ‘languages’ but also in societies which are multilingual in the sense that employ separate dialects, registers or functionally differentiated language vari- eties of whatever kind” (Fishman, 30). Fishman paints an ambitious blueprint for a new “broad diglossia,” which proved to be very appealing to later social linguists. 11. The appropriations are in two aspects. First, Ferguson’s model seems only to concern itself with the spoken language. Second, the picture of the linguistic structure of pre- modern China complicates itself by the presence of different dialects, which in a sense challenges the binary system proposed by Ferguson. But since what is at issue here is the written language of China, mainly the relationship between wenyan and 144 Notes baihua, I allow myself to simplify the picture. I understand such simplification comes at the expense of 1) a more sophisticated view of baihua (the vernacular) as the lin- guistic medium in fiction and opera and as guanhua (Mandarin) required of almost everyone in or associated with the civil service, including manuals and guidebooks for how actually to carry out the tasks of being a magistrate, etc.; and 2) the rela- tionship between baihua (the vernacular) and local dialects, the informal spoken lan- guage. Most recently, Edward Gunn has done substantial work on spoken languages in contemporary China. See, Edward Gunn, Rendering the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). 12. As many scholars have acknowledged, it is extremely difficult to determine exactly when the writing script of ancient Chinese began to diverge form speech. Bernhard Karlgren estimated that Chinese writing and speech started to part ways roughly at the end of the Western Han period (206 B.C. to 22 A.D.). Some other scholars such as John DeFrancis believe that the divorce of writing from speech started much earlier, probably in the earliest stages of Chinese writing, the Shang period. Also see Liangyan Ge, Out of the Margin: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). As many scholars have acknowledged, it is extremely difficult to determine. 13. Ge, 11. 14. See Victor Mair’s research on Tun-huang Manuscripts: T’ang Transformation Texts (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1989). 15. Ferguson, “Diglossia,” 328. 16. Hu Shi, “Introduction to Monkey,”