Conditions of Comparison: Reflections on Comparative Intercultural Inquiry

by Ming Xie

Overview

How do we know the other culture? How do such inquiries impact on our knowledge of our own culture? These questions lie at the heart of comparative intercultural studies. As a theoretical inquiry into how conceptual resources of cultures (such as explicit and implicit categories of thought) may pre-figure our perspectives, this book re-conceives and reorients comparative intercultural inquiry by arguing for the importance of an epistemological approach and for its potential to transform current critical paradigms, in contrast to approaches that emphasize primarily the political and the ethical. By critically engaging with and developing the insights of scholars and thinkers from both Anglo-American and Continental traditions, the book makes a significant meta-critical contribution to a rethinking of comparative intercultural studies and literary theory. It will be of interest to students and scholars in comparative literature, English, world literature, and global and translation studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623565374
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/28/2013
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ming Xie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry (Routledge, 1999).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Multiple Definition
Chapter 2: From Comparison to Comparativity
Chapter 3: Hermeneutic Distanciation
Chapter 4: From Episteme to Paradigm and Back
Chapter 5: Splitting the Difference
Chapter 6: The Relativity of Relativisms
Chapter 7: Universalisms East and West
Chapter 8: Occidentalizing Modernity
Epilogue
Works Cited
Notes

Editorial Reviews

Comparison is ubiquitous and universal, Ming Xie forcefully argues, and merits investigation for its epistemological underpinnings beyond the political and the pragmatic. Conditions of Comparison is an invaluable study of comparativity, focusing particularly on intercultural encounters. Incommensurability and misrecognition are components of what he calls 'critical comparativity,' a perceptual process that he promotes as a necessity for the intensified global interconnections of the 21st century. Drawing on thinkers from across the humanities, Ming Xie makes a strong case for epistemologically informed comparative practices.

Susan Stanford Friedman

This is a book we've been awaiting for a long time. Moving beyond established critiques of conventional models of comparative study, Ming Xie provides a rigorous analysis of the conceptual foundations and methodological challenges of intercultural inquiry. His dissections of the critical categories underpinning current work on translation, world literature, post-colonial theory, and East/West studies--categories such as universalism, pluralism, orientalism, essentialism, incommensurability, and difference--are virtuoso performances: richly nuanced, philosophically grounded, and tremendously productive. Compelling both in its elaboration of the stakes and epistemological conditions of comparative practice and in its gestures towards a new meta-critical framework for global studies marked by flexibility, contingency, and reflexivity, this book will prove an essential touchstone for the theory and practice of comparative scholarship in the humanities.

David Porter

Conditions of Comparison offers a meticulous genealogy and timely recapitulation of key critical concepts, reading protocols, and analytical instruments that constitute the discipline of comparative literature and culture. Ming Xie ably demonstrates the potential of this disciplinary formation for what he terms comparative intercultural inquiry as interpretive practice and ethical intervention among diverse cultures, their historical imbrications, and contrapuntal engagements. An exemplary study that illustrates the self-reflexive practices whose history it eloquently narrates.

Djelal Kadir

[T]his book is of immense value and should find a home not only on the syllabuses of seminars devoted to intercultural inquiry but also in introductions to literary theory, where it could serve as a means of bringing intercultural inquiry into the central position within theoretical discussions that it should occupy by right and by necessity.” —Alexander J. Beecroft, University of South Carolina

From the Publisher

[T]his book is of immense value and should find a home not only on the syllabuses of seminars devoted to intercultural inquiry but also in introductions to literary theory, where it could serve as a means of bringing intercultural inquiry into the central position within theoretical discussions that it should occupy by right and by necessity.

University of South Carolina Alexander J. Beecroft