In Between East and West/Word and Image, Geng Youzhuang, one of China’s leading intellectuals, offers an original and sophisticated analysis of both Western cultural and literary theory and contemporary Chinese thought. In this fascinating exploration of the respective intellectual traditions within China and the West, Geng shows how the dynamics at work between word and image become a parable for understanding the larger relationship between Chinese and Western ideas.
Geng first surveys influential Western thinkers and their ideas, with a special focus on the relations between words and things, signs and meanings, image and language. He next explores the conflicted relationship between religion and literature in the West. Finally, Geng turns his focus to China, discussing the meaning and significance of sinology and the possibilities of treating China as a sign and referent in contemporary Western thinking. Anyone interested in the forces at work within the intermingling of Eastern and Western literature, writing, and the semiotics of culture, will find Between East and West/Word and Image compelling.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I
1 The Construction of Language and Vision
On Roland Barthes’ ‘Les mots et les choses’
2 Meditation on Flames and Ashes
Jacques Derrida’s ‘Semiotics’
3 The End of Poetry and the Impossibility of Witness
On Giorgio Agamben’s Poetics
4 ‘Philopainting’ or ‘Pictophilosophy’?
Gilles Deleuze’s Reading of Francis Bacon’s Paintings
II
5 Augustine’s ‘Self-Portrait’
Confessions as a Literary Autobiography
6 Aesthetic Theology
Theological Aesthetics after von Balthasar
7 Miracles and Revolutionary Reversals
Terry Eagleton’s Theological Turn
8 The Rhetoric of Icons
From Image to Voice
III
9 Between Reality and Imagination
The Phenomenon of Contemporary Chinese Art
10 Gesture and Ľécriture
The Chinese ‘Content’ in Contemporary Western
Philosophy of Art
11 Sinological Studies and Literary Imagination
A Reflection on Sinology and a Review of
Jonathan Stalling’s Poetics of Emptiness
12 Moving Boundaries
How Can Scriptural Reasoning Enter
into the Chinese Context?
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Credits
Index
About the author
GENG Youzhuang is Professor of Comparative Literature in the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China.
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