Fortress Besieged New Directions Classic

The greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century, Fortress Besieged is a classic of world literature, a masterpiece of parodic fiction that plays with Western literary traditions, philosophy, and middle-class Chinese society in the Republican era. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien (á la Emma Bovary), with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake American university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.

This timely book offers uplifting examples of major figures in Chinese and Western civilization from ancient to modern times who learned from and influenced each other. Rather than emphasizing cultural differences, this inspiring text highlights successful dialogue, commonalities, and mutual influences in this regard. Readers familiar with the Western canon will discover surprising influences of China on well-known Anglosphere writers and critics. Drawing on an expansive range of periods in the East and West from classical to contemporary times, it is a tour-de-force of theoretical range and practical impact. Starting with Confucius and Socrates, the chapters move chronologically on to address such major figures in Eastern writing as Zhuangzi, Qian Zhongshu, and Zhang Longxi, and Western figures including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Empson, Nietzsche, and Fredric Jameson. The book will appeal to scholars and students at all educational levels, as well as the general public interested in understanding past and current East-West cultural relations.

Fundamental Structures of the Chinese Language is an exceptional resource for understanding how Chinese grammar functions in natural discourse. This book departs from the conventional approach of superimposing grammatical constructs from English onto Chinese and focuses on the topic–comment structure inherent in the Chinese language. Constructions that are usually considered complex or challenging for students whose mother tongues are subject–verb–object languages will be more easily understandable with this analysis. Simple and complex verbal structures are discussed in depth with the incorporation of the aspect category, which provides an enormous richness of nuances in the internal development of the action, and word order is considered one of the key features of the Chinese language. All the explanations are applied to numerous examples of real Chinese texts. This textbook is a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers in Chinese language courses including Chinese translation, Chinese linguistics, and comparison linguistics in general.

Extraordinary advances in machine translation over the last three quarters of a century have profoundly affected many aspects of the translation profession. The widespread integration of adaptive “artificially intelligent” technologies has radically changed the way many translators think and work. In turn, groundbreaking empirical research has yielded new perspectives on the cognitive basis of the human translation process. Translation is in the throes of radical transition on both professional and academic levels. The game-changing introduction of neural machine translation engines almost a decade ago accelerated these transitions. This volume takes stock of the depth and breadth of resulting developments, highlighting the emerging rivalry of human and machine intelligence. The gathering and analysis of big data is a common thread that has given access to new insights in widely divergent areas, from literary translation to movie subtitling to consecutive interpreting to development of flexible and powerful new cognitive models of translation.

The first major work in Sino-Western comparative semiotics, Parallels, Interactions, and Illuminations is a trans-disciplinary and intercultural effort that makes intellectual connections not only across such diverse academic fields as epistemology, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and cultural studies but also between Chinese and Western theories of the sign in the conviction that they can shed light on one another. In this groundbreaking work, Ersu Ding studies two traditions of semiotic realism, represented by Plato and Husserl in the West and by Mo Zi and Ouyang Jian in China. They share two fundamental assumptions with regard to meaning: that there exist ultimate qualities of things and states of affairs in the extrasemiotic world and that the meanings of words or other types of sign are derivatives of these essentials. A pioneering work that remains extraordinarily accessible, Parallels, Interactions, and Illuminations explores a wide range of issues, including inter-subjective negotiation of meaning, the relationship between metaphor and culture, and the production and dissemination of myths.

This book brings together the essay collection "Written in the margins of life (Xie zai ren sheng bian shang)" and the short story collection "Human, beast, ghost (Ren shou gui)."

China’s Literary Cosmopolitans offers a comprehensive introduction to the intertwined literary careers of Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911) and explains why they have come to represent compelling models of Chinese-centric literary cosmopolitanism.