| Title | : | The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Modernist Literature and Culture) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0195382498 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780195382495 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 278 |
| Publication | : | First published April 1, 2009 |
The Hypothetical Mandarin is, in some sense, a history of the Western imagination. It is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, of globalization, of human rights, and of the idea of the modern. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the former would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. Hayots wide-ranging discussion draws on accounts of torture, on medical case studies, travelers tales, photographs, plasticized corpses, polemical broadsides, watercolors, and on oil paintings. His analyses show that the historical connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "China," and why the story of the West's Chinese pain goes to the heart of the relation between language and the body and the social experience of the modern human being.
Written in an ebullient prose, The Hypothetical Mandarin demonstrates how the network that intertwines China, sympathy, and modernity continues to shape the economic and human experience.
The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Modernist Literature and Culture) Reviews
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I declared to have read this book because I've read the part recommended by my professor (Intro and Chapter 2). It's very insightful but too deconstructive to my taste. Well, my taste can change. I still need to read a few other books he suggested to figure out whether I want to think the way he thinks. Right now, my intuition tells me it's a useful way of thinking but only one of the many useful ways. But I don't want to get caught up with the deconstructive instinct and forget about the larger picture: despite the inconsistencies in all things written (no matter what's written and who wrote them) can I learn anything from them? Deconstruction is only one way of showing how things don't work, my search is more about how to make things work a little better than before. This predetermines that my search is going to be full of mistakes, how could you learn without exhausting all possible mistakes in life? Well, in that sense, deconstruction is also a way to learn from past mistakes by others. It's showing respect in the ultimate sense. So maybe I can think deconstructively after all.
Oh, about the book itself, it's a great piece on the discourse of humanity and sympathy in China under the Western gaze. -
Brilliant book. Reviewed for Clio.
