In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Xudong Zhang about his article “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss how the specific comparison between China and the West leads to new methodologies of comparison; how a thematic mode of comparison works to bring China and the West in relation to each other; how the need for both a closed horizon, indicating a kind of self-isolation, and a common humanity relate to one another; how comparison can be framed within a context of both movement and action; and how comparison links the particular to the universal. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.
China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison
Xudong Zhang
When it comes to methodologies of comparison between China and the West, it is difficult to recall many meaningful discussions based on the conventional, by now largely obsolete, textbook formula of “influence studies” and “parallel studies” as stock “methods” in comparative literature as an academic discipline.[1] To compare, say, landscape poetry or female protagonists in Chinese and European literary traditions almost invariably leads to something too capricious or too general. Such studies often result in mere explanations, even descriptions, of cultural features or aesthetic distinctions standing outside the space of critical interpretation.
Certainly, this has more to do with disciplinary and professional assumptions and institutional fallacies and unthinking than scholarly incompetence on an individual basis. Such empirical approaches originated from the study of the interactions and coeval developments between Indo-European literatures and cultures. Therefore, these models still carry a certain historical validity, but a validity not readily applicable to comparisons between China and the West, whose intellectual substance and methodological procedures must be historical and critical, thus ultimately political in nature. In other words, it is less that older methods of comparison fail China–West comparison and more that the new questions, situations, and dynamisms of the China–West focus change both the definition and epistemological compass of comparison as we know it. A natural starting point then would be to compare older, more established models of comparison with the newer, more dynamic models. As models for observing and understanding identity and difference, the older model was rooted in a more homogeneous context; shared religious, historical, socioeconomic, and intellectual artistic experiences constituted the platform on which differentiations were to be analyzed. Newer models meanwhile rest on an inherently unstable and still-evolving platform where both identity and difference, similarity and contrast are to be grasped along with gigantic social, geopolitical, and moral-emotional fault lines as objective or subjective expressions of radically heterogeneous contexts. As forms of life or realms of social being, they possess not only different genealogies of styles and tastes but possibly fundamentally different worldviews and political ontologies.
The challenge of methodological reflection on China–West comparison therefore means to step back from given disciplinary frames of reference and return to historical, philosophical, and necessarily political circumstances. That means to the experiences, questions, and organized intellectual inquiries that might be incommensurate with inter-European comparisons. Furthermore, the larger scales and heightened human intensities that can be properly analyzed in this new context must be recognized and comprehended as forms and representations of an integrated system. Its intrinsic methodological principles give legitimacy and effectiveness to comparison as a new modality of thinking and activity that is poised to absorb and overcome differences, opposites, diversities, and multiplicities as merely given. Without such a new concept, comparison will tend to remain with its “emphasis . . . on externals” and “stress on mere ‘fact’, on sources and influences.”[2]
Here, I propose five maxims as a starting point in search of a systematic methodology in China–West comparison. My reflections are naturally rooted in my own work in the field of literary and cultural analysis. However, as literary interpretations and cultural analyses have long been theorized to include considerations in intellectual history, philosophy, anthropology, (geo)politics, and political economy, I hope my methodological considerations have resonance in some of these areas as well—if only as a target for criticism. Even though the discussions below are theoretical and sometimes abstract, they are nonetheless based on and oriented by concrete activities and the practical-productive pursuit of comparison as it concerns and animates our scholarly and intellectual inquiry. These maxims include:
1. Go thematic, as self-propelling yet relatable questions tend to work better.
2. Establish the common platform, frame of reference, and a closed horizon.
3. Keep your eyes on action/movement/vibration-resonance/affectivity.
4. Start with the particular but aim at the universal as an open-ended process.
5. Strive for totality. (To relate, to mediate, to negate, to absorb, to expand, and to narrate. On and on and on and on!)
Continue reading this article at the Telos Online website. If your library does not yet subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page to let them know how.
1. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1956). See in particular ch. 5, “General, Comparative, and National Literature,” pp. 46–53. Wellek rightly points out that “comparison is a method used by all criticism and sciences, and does not, in any way, adequately describe the specific procedures of literary study,” even though “[in] practice, the term ‘comparative’ literature has covered and still covers rather distinct fields of study and groups of problems.”
2. Ibid., p. 48.
