In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Sijia Yao about her article “Third Term Comparison,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the difference between world literature and comparative literature, as well as the methodological advantages of comparison; the pervasiveness of biases in both Chinese and Western discourses about the other, and how these biases should be approached; the difference between a binary comparison and a third term comparison; how one can do a third term comparison; and how a third term comparison of D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang avoids the binary opposition between China and the West. 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.
Third Term Comparison
Sijia Yao
To compare, or not to compare? Since when did that become a question? As long as the discipline of comparative literature is situated in the singular discourse of absolute equity, to compare has become a tabooed concept and action. As Zhang Longxi laments, “In the postmodern critique of fundamentals, we are told not to essentialize anything and not to hold things in a metaphysical hierarchy, as though any kind of comparison or differentiation, any value judgment, or any order of things would result in a repressive regime that privileges one and, of necessity, excludes all other alternatives.”[1] This reluctance to make value judgments has led the field of comparative literature to turn to world literature as a way of overcoming a Eurocentric bias by integrating discussion of non-European literature. World literature attempts to thereby go beyond national traditions and eliminate bias to promote a universal culture of literature that advocates equity but avoids comparison. David Damrosch sets up an opposition between national literatures and world literature in which the study of the former historically contextualizes a literary text whereas the latter decontextualizes it. In defining world literature, he writes, “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.”[2] Accordingly, the world literature idea does not establish relationships between cultural traditions. Instead, it focuses on traveling texts in order to set up a universal culture. Zhang Longxi, for instance, tries to imagine a global canon of literature that consists of “a relatively stable set of canonical works from the world’s different literary traditions.”[3] This canon does not depend on its development within a particular historical tradition. Instead, such a global canon attempts to establish a worldwide tradition maintained within the minds of some comparative/world literature professors. Zhang Longxi’s recent idea of world literature (which conflicts with his earlier ideas about comparison[4]) tends to dissolve cultural traditions into a unified world literature as a set of core texts that takes a form of objectivity and universality.
The alternative is to focus on the recipient of literature as the core, which leads us to return to the idea of just comparing two traditions, which not only is more feasible but also makes more sense because it bridges between two contexts, thereby setting up dialogue and relationship. This relationship does not have to adhere to the model of core and periphery, which often lies at the basis of conceptions of world literature,[5] but can treat both cultures as equally significant in shaping the interaction. Such a comparison begins with a focus on a tradition and its reception of a foreign text. David Porter dwells on the European, primarily British, comparison with China from the perspective of Western reception. The Western reception of China, implied by Porter, is full of preoccupations that obscure any possibility of an authentic meaning of Chinese culture but always revolves around Europe’s own identity. Porter’s argument focuses on the way in which British tradition received foreignness, “how cultural self-definition is renegotiated in the wake of a transformative encounter with difference.”[6] This mode shows the bias with which a national tradition receives and understands a foreign text. Haun Saussy extends Porter’s method by looking at both directions of the comparison and showing the biases in each tradition that distort the foreign text but simultaneously allow for the comparison and integration into the local tradition. Saussy looks at the ways in which biases shape Western reception of China as well as Chinese reception of the West, for instance in the interaction between Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and Yang Ting-yun (杨廷筠, 1557–1621).[7] Porter and Saussy share a comparative method that is driven by the purpose of understanding a national tradition and how the reception of a foreign culture directly influences the national tradition. For them, cultural context and subjective judgment are two methodological preconditions to generate an effective comparative project.
Biases are inescapable because they are the symptoms of the process by which any text is received in terms of the receiver’s preconceptions. “Mediation becomes visible as preconception or bias,”[8] and Saussy emphasizes “that we are always in the midst of mediation, that mediation is our authenticity—whoever ‘we’ may be.”[9] But if mediation is necessary, we do not have to treat the process of mediation as a liability or a source of distortion. Rather, we can take control of the mediation process by consciously choosing a bias, which is to say a particular intention, to guide the analysis. This conscious intention defines the third term that motivates the comparison and offers it a direction. When it comes to the methodology of comparison, the question that needs to be addressed first is the purpose of comparison, which must be established before the task of “excavating and activating the historically specific set of relationalities across time and space.”[10] The inherent intention of comparing determines what I call the “third term comparison” method, which establishes at the outset a purpose that allows the concentration on two texts from two very distinctive cultural contexts, reestablishing and reshaping relationships. The third term allows us to investigate a text in its relationship to its own tradition and then to compare those two relationships to each other.
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1. Zhang Longxi, From Comparison to World Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), p. 17.
2. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), p. 4.
3. Zhang Longxi, From Comparison to World Literature, p. 181.
4. Zhang Longxi, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005).
5. Franco Moretti relies on the core/periphery framework for his notion of world literature. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan–Feb 2000): 55–56. In a slight shift, Shu-mei Shih attempts to think about relationalities between different cultures within different imperial networks. Shu-mei Shih, “World Studies and Relational Comparison,” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 435.
6. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), p. 14.
7. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 17–30.
8. Ibid., p. 2.
9. Ibid., p. 3.
10. Cf. Shih, “World Studies and Relational Comparison,” p. 437.
