Shudong Chen 
Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody [EPUB ebook] 

In the light of Chinese prosody and various mutually illuminating major cases from the original English, Chinese, French, Japanese and German classical literary texts, the book explores the possibility of discovering ‚;a road not taken‘ within the road well-trodden in literature. In an approach of ‚;what Wittgenstein calls criss-crossing, ‚ this monographic study, the first ever of this nature, as Roger T. Ames points out in the Foreword, also emphasizes a pivotal ‚;recognition that these Chinese values [revealed in the book] are immediately relevant to the Western narrative as well‘; the book demonstrates, in other words, how such a ‚;criss-crossing‘ approach would be unequivocally possible as long as our critical attention be adequately turned to or pivoted upon the ‚;trivial‘ matters, a posteriori, in accordance with the live syntactic-prosodic context, such as pauses, stresses, phonemes, function words, or the at once text-enlivened and text-enlivening ambiguity of ‚;parts of speech, ‚ which often vary or alter simultaneously according to and against any definitive definition or set category a priori. This issue pertains to any literary text across cultures because no literary text would ever be possibleif it were not, for instance, literally enlivened by the otherwise overlooked ‚;meaningless‘ function words or phonemes; the texts simultaneously also enliven these ‚;meaningless‘ elements and often turn them surreptitiously into sometimes serendipitously meaningful and beautiful sea-change-effecting ‚;les mots justes.‘ Through the immeasurable and yet often imperceptible influences of these exactly ‚;right words, ‚ our literary texts, such as a poem, could thus not simply ‚;be‘ but subtly ‚;mean‘ as if by mere means of its simple, rich, and naturally worded being, truly a special ‚;word picture‘ of das Ding an sich. Describable metaphorically as ‚;museum effect‘ and ‚;symphonic tapestry, ‚ a special synaesthetic impact could also likely result from such les-mots-justes-facilitated subtle and yet phenomenal sea changes in the texts.