Abstract

In this research paper, we try to explore the concept of James Liu's book. We try to focus this research on the James Liu's book "The Interlingual Critic: Interpreting Chinese Poetry". Finally, we think through Liu's work and identify advantages as well as problems, avenues for improvement.

"The Interlingual Critic: Interpreting Chinese Poetry"

Introduction

James J. Y Liu, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, is not only one of the world's foremost scholars and critics of Chinese poetry but also has shown a knack for sophisticated yet accessible presentation of issues of Chinese poetry and poetics to specialists and non specialists alike. The Interlingual Critic completes a triad of seminal works (including The Art of Chinese Poetry [Chicago: 1962) and Chinese Theories of Literature [Chicago: 1975)) that introduce Chinese poetry and poetics to Western students of literature in terms they should readily understand. These works provide avenues of access to Chinese poetry for students who know no Chinese and, perhaps even more importantly, thrust upon students of Chinese literature the extraordinary paradoxes and complexities of their enterprise (Chen, 202).

Discussion

This Book, James J.Y. Liu's seventh, examines the principles and practice of what he calls the "interlingual critic," the writer in English about Chinese poetry. The most recent and ambitious of his attempts to establish a general, theoretical framework within which a Western critic of Chinese poetry might work, it draws only incidentally on traditional Chinese critical writings, being chiefly concerned with the more generally applicable insights of contemporary Western literary theorists such as M.H. Abrams and Mikel Dufrenne.

Perhaps as a consequence, it marks a considerable increase in sophistication over some of Liu's earlier work. The book consists of an autobiographical introduction, which re- counts the way in which the author personally came to be an "interlingual critic"; a theoretical chapter centered around his concept of the "tetradic circle" implied by a work of the art (world, artist, work, and audience) and its implications for criticism; four chapters dealing with specific functions of the critic (reader, translator, interpreter, arbiter); and a final chapter that applies some ideas explored earlier in the book to a particular problem, the relations among "time, self, and space" in Chinese poetry (Cranmer, 45).

Parts of the book have appeared elsewhere in recent years, but the book as a whole is a new production. One question raised by the book (and considered briefly in its introduction) concerns its audience. As a fellow "interlingual critic" myself, I found chiefly useful for its references to literary theorists presently active in the field of Western literature whose ideas might prove stimulating for the student of Chinese literature. Many were familiar but others-such as in garden, Iser, and Ellis-were not, and the author's comments on their ideas may prove useful for the future. (It is, incidentally, heartening to find in Liu a critic who remains unimpressed by Roman Jakobson's simplistic and uninformative comments on Chinese poetic structure.) How much of interest it will be to literary theorists working in fields outside of Chinese literature ...