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.