Chinese Christian Studies and Anglophone Literary Studies

It was with surprise, aptly enough, and gladness that I read the opening page of Nirvana Tanoukhi’s article, “Surprise Me If You Can,” in the 2016 PMLA Special Issue, Literature in the World. Tanoukhi describes “a lecture that J. Hillis Miller gave at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University on the challenges of reading World Literature” in 2010, in which he conjectured on how to enable Chinese readers to be “the best possible readers” of World Literature, with William Butler Yeats’s early twentieth-century English poem “The Cold Heaven” as a case study. Miller supplied information on the author’s biography, genre, Christian allusions, and considerations for particularly perplexing and site-specific references in order to provide them with a “kind of basic making sense” (1424), given the poem’s “vast substratum” (1423), information that he believed would be equally appropriate for today’s Anglophone readers. The audience responded immediately with a standing ovation, while Tanoukhi was left troubled by the ethics of such a “prescriptive interventio[n]” (1424), one that would leave a “Chinese reader … an engaged reader but a disengaged critic” (1425). In the 2011 Neohelicon article based on the lecture, “Globalization and World Literature,” Miller situates his hypothetical intervention squarely within the arena of training engaged readers—“Suppose I were a Chinese scholar preparing a textbook in Chinese of World Literature” ¹ —and demonstrates his awareness of, although not a resolution to, the methodological conundrum of developing engaged readers into sensitive and engaged critics (Tanoukhi 1425). In her article, Tanoukhi records her sensitive tracking of the matter of engaged critics, with the greatest attention given to Western critics from the 1970s to the present, especially Bruno Latour and Eve Sedgewick, a tracking that left her too not with a resolution but rather a return to the “question of reading to fundamentals: What do we want? Why do we want it?” (1433).

I was surprised and gladdened to read this account because of not only its intrinsic arguments and contributions to the field of literary studies but also my experience of a similar set of circumstances and methodological conundrums within another Anglophone-Chinese context. In what follows, I briefly describe those circumstances in the service of offering a set of interventions from my Western, and no doubt idiosyncratic, perspective to further facilitate Anglophone–Chinese literary critical conversations, especially among engaged critics in Christian studies.

Two inviting inroads for Chinese–Western literary conversations—Marxist criticism and translations studies—became clear from my response to my analogue to Miller, Chin Kenpa (Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan), in the “Theology and Theory in Chinese Literary Studies” seminar at Yale University in April 2016. ² My invitation to the seminar, conducted in English and comprised of seven Chinese-national and -institutionally based scholars and eight “US/UK”-based scholars, was due to my publications in World Literature, specifically Chinese literature as World Literature (i.e. in English translation and within predominantly Western disciplinary constructs), and religious studies, specifically biblical studies; and my role was to be a respondent to Chin’s paper, “Chinese Marxist Biblical Criticism on Jesus: A Study on W.T. Chu (朱维之).” ³

Chin’s paper sought to draw attention to the Chinese biography Wuchanzhe Yesu 無產者耶穌 (Jesus, the Proletarian) by W.T. Chu (1905–1999, 朱維之, Zhu Weizhi) given its engagement with issues central to liberation theology and Christian socialism. Thus, in preparation, I turned readily to the (deservedly) foundational Western critical texts of Marxist biblical criticism. ⁴ I was stymied, however, in my attempts to access an English translation of Jesus, the Proletarian—I do not read or speak Chinese. ⁵ I was also unsuccessful in obtaining recommendations from colleagues in literature and religious studies departments at Anglophone institutions for foundational critical Chinese texts on Marxist biblical criticism in English translation. ⁶ I sought such works in accord with Zhang Longxi’s astute appreciation of the fact that “For comparative literature to really go beyond the European and Western horizon, then, a higher degree of sensibility to, and an intimate knowledge of, the different local cultures, literary traditions, and historical and sociopolitical conditions are prerequisite for adequate understanding and successful comparison” (234). Time and desire enough do not exist for me, contra Ezra Pound’s The ABCs of Reading, to add Chinese to my varying facilities in English, Spanish, Latin, and Italian. ⁷ Further, I am satisfied with reading, for example, Homer’s epics, the critical work of Jacques Derrida, and, more to the point, the writings of Karl Marx in English or Spanish translation, in the tradition of general literary studies and World Literature, even though it counters the (desirable) linguistic rigor of comparative literature and requires vigilance about the limitations of what I am able to do with the objects of study. ⁸ To advance the field of literary studies and my own Barthian “pleasure of the text,” I agree with Zhang that “Simple application of Western theories to non-Western materials” is “anathema” and that “specialists” committed to the “rigor of their discipline” can and should aim to bring “broader interests, knowledge, and vision” even to literary and cultural traditions in which they do not possess direct linguistic facility (Zhang 234).

Chin’s paper provided me with an opportunity to bring in my interest in Marxist criticism, which I believe to be among the most promising areas for fostering Chinese–Western critical dialogues in a variety of fields, given the “solid and distinct Marxist training that Chinese scholars” receive and of the unique developments of Marxism in China that have insufficiently circulated in Western academic culture (Bing 455). During the two summer school sessions that I taught a “Nobel Prizes in Literature” course (in English) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, only a few years after Miller’s lecture there, I asked the SJTU students enrolled in the course to note that one of the readings for the day, the seven-page entry on “Marxist Criticism” in M.H. Abram’s excellent A Glossary of Literary Terms, mentions no Chinese Marxist critics among the references to Marx, Engels, Georg Lukács, and others of the Frankfurt School, French Louis Althusser, Italian Antonio Gramsci, and others (155–161).

Compensating for my stymied access to Chu’s Jesus, the Proletarian and Chinese Marxist biblical criticism in English translation was an unexpected encounter—another “surprise”—with two nearly identical published versions from 2015, also in English, of Chin’s seminar paper, not referenced in the seminar’s text or notes. Their digital presence in the China-based journal Sino-Christian Studies and the Russia-based journal Stasis led me to a sustained consideration of the forms of labor and value that Chin’s productions and re-productions represent. In Anglophone academic publishing, single publication and republication of the same or expanded versions with acknowledgement of previous versions are deeply engrained and work well given Western vetting processes and circulation. These processes are not without their critics, however, as evidenced by Stanley Fish’s “No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission” and Amitava Kumar’s response. Thus, Chin and others could provide information vital to Western scholars’ assessments of Chinese academic publication practices as well as to self-assessments of Western publication practices.

The two published versions of Chin’s paper also led me to consider the more immediate and practical matter of format in Eastern and Western academic publication. Like the pre-seminar version of the paper I received, Chin’s two articles provide his English translations of the Chinese originals but do not possess original Chinese quotations, whether in-text or in footnotes or endnotes. This format forefronts three key, interrelated matters: the linguistic context, uneven academic cultural resources, and agency within publishing networks. Given the places of publication and corresponding target audiences of Sino-Christian Studies and Stasis, the absence of Chinese originals may be inconsequential because the assumed readers likely have access to the originals for their subsequent explorations of the materials prompted by Chin’s article. As mentioned, this is not the case in Western academic contexts with Chu’s Jesus, the Proletarian and, based on my discussions with colleagues in Chinese studies, a number of other primary and secondary texts well known in China.

This lack of access creates an obstacle for Chinese–Western exchange. ⁹ I am not alone within Anglophone academia in my hesitancy to rely on tertiary sources and translations in critical works absent of originals. Certainly, scholars in Chinese studies and from Sinophone institutions, like Chin, are right to assume that most scholars within Anglophone literary circles cannot understand original Chinese quotations. Such a state of affairs does not, however, render Chinese originals in predominantly Western domains extraneous to those same readers. Within Western academic circles and given the ease of communication in today’s (unevenly) globalized world, these readers often have Sinophone colleagues in an academic culture that promotes consultation and, increasingly, collaboration. Provision of the Chinese originals is particularly warranted in Christian studies, especially biblical studies, with its strong emphasis on linguistics and etymology.

These first two matters factor into the third: the agency of scholars in the production of their scholarly work. A ready response to my recommendation for the inclusion of English translations and foreign-language originals might be that journals and presses object to or prohibit the inclusion of foreign-language originals in deference to a streamlined presentation or layout requiring brevity. ¹⁰ Scholars can assert their agency to convince publishers that the provision of foreign-language originals, either in-text alongside English translations or in footnotes or endnotes, promotes the development of the fields in which their publications are key agents and might lead to their wider circulation. Such assertions of agency require additional labor but are not quixotic.

On two occasions, I found myself moved to such assertions. For my chapter “The Textual Conversation of de Las Casas’s Brevísima relación and Its 1656 British Translation,” in the edited collection Approaches to Teaching the Works of Bartolomé de Las Casas, I asked the coeditors of the collection to present to the press my justification for the inclusion of three visual images. I explained that I strongly believed that many of the users of this collection would be in countries and educational institutions in the Global South with limited access to the originals and internet sources, such as Early English Books Online and Hathi Trust, that they believed ubiquitous. Given my strong belief in the importance of users’ access to the images and my respect for the Modern Language Association Press’s belief in the utility of short chapters for its Approaches to Teaching series, I agreed to reduce the length of my written text to compensate for the images’ additional space. My experience in teaching, researching, and presenting in Latin American universities and research institutes has confirmed my conviction that the assertion of my agency was worth the additional labor and my mild discomfort with the potential for being perceived as a pest rather than as an active collaborator.

The second occasion relates directly to inclusion of English translations accompanied by foreign-language originals. For the twenty-eight-chapter edited volume Milton in Translation (2017), my coeditors Islam Issa and Jonathan R. Olson and I agreed that the volume should contain both English translations and foreign-language originals from the twenty-three languages covered in the volume, despite the additional labor it meant for us in the preparation of the manuscript and for both the contributors and the Oxford University Press editorial staff in the typesetting and proof stages. ¹¹ My coeditors and I were pleased that the press readily agreed, and an unexpected benefit was that we were able to submit the chapters to an additional level of refinement during the preparatory stage by having specialists in those twenty-three languages review the accuracy of the contributors’ translations in our quest for that (deservedly) all-important goal of rigor. We are convinced that all of our readers will gain from the inclusion: for those lacking knowledge of specific languages, exposure to the various languages and scripts, and, for those with knowledge, immediate access to at least the quoted parts of literary and critical works that may be unavailable otherwise to them.

These three interrelated matters are far from nugatory. The interpretive possibilities that can emerge from these matters can be seen from my engagement with the few Chinese originals in Chin’s seminar paper, specifically in terms of literary studies, genre studies, and even Milton studies. Chin’s outline of the evolution of the Jesus figure in China and in Chu’s work provides us with important insights about the role of literary studies. Chin avers that “Christianity came to China riding the coattails of Western imperialism” and thus “most Chinese still regard it as an instrument of foreign aggression.” He then states that Chu portrayed “Jesus as a poet” and “describes the influence the image of Jesus has had on world literature” in two of his works of the 1940s (7). According to Chin, these early literary characterizations of Jesus fed into Chu’s later one in Jesus, the Proletarian of Jesus “not only [as] a literary genius, but also as a revolutionary dedicated to countering such sources of oppression as imperialism, colonialism, and poverty” (10). The dual roles of poet and revolutionary that Chin claims Chu attributes to Jesus resonate with Marx’s sustained interest in the 1870s with cult figures and peaceful revolutionaries. Further, as has been amply demonstrated, large-scale forms of social power, such as imperialism and colonialism, depend upon writing, both for practical communication across often large distances and for persuasion, the provenance of the literary. Thus, Chin’s paper can be put in fruitful conversation with recent Western work in literary studies and its intersection with biblical studies. For example, upon further development, Chin’s research might serve as support for Roland Boer’s controversial claim in his Marxist Criticism of the Bible (2003) about the relationship of biblical studies and literary studies: “One of the implications of the need to consider theory in biblical studies, and I suspect that this is one of the half-acknowledged challenges, is that it makes it increasingly clear that biblical studies is in fact a subset of literary criticism, that the interpretation of the Bible is but part of a much larger discipline that is concerned with the interpretation of texts” (2). Boer situates biblical studies, so closely associated with theology, Christianity, and the correlative anxiety they provoke, within the less provocative field of literary criticism that emerged as part of Enlightenment cultural projects leading towards secularism. J. Hillis Miller gestures towards a similar move but from the starting point of literary studies, in his 2011 article based on his SJTU talk:

World Literature in its recently resurrected form is indubitably a concomitant of economic and financial globalization, as well as of new world-wide telecommunications. Marx and Engels long ago, in a famous passage in the Communist Manifesto (1848), prophetically said just that: “And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a World Literature.” ¹²

Situating religious texts in the less fraught field of World Literature can mitigate censorial responses to texts associated with Christian studies or Western literature. Such a conversation strengthens the relationship of biblical studies and literary studies and, by extension, promotes the acceptability of biblical, and by extension Christian, studies in Sinophone institutions, as Miller is well aware given his decades-long work with Chinese colleagues and in Chinese institutions.

What might these relationships contribute to World Literature? To take but one example to be drawn from Chin’s seminar paper, we might be able to deepen our understanding of genre. In introducing Chu’s Jesus, the Proletarian, Chin avers the basis for the obscurity of the work to be that it “is full of political implications” (5); then, near the conclusion, Chin makes the fascinating claim that “In the West, a theologian establishes his reputation by completing a work on Christology; in China one does so by completing a biography of Jesus” (27). The first statement draws us towards questions of reader reception, the latter towards those regarding the critical context and production of the genre of biography. Western readers have been conditioned to expect “political implications” in biographies by, for example, the Parallel Lives of Greek and Roman notables by the Greek writer Plutarch and to imbricated political and religious implications by the medieval hagiographies that laid the groundwork for the development of the genre of biography in eighteenth-century England. What, apparently differing, characteristics were mid-twentieth-century Chinese readers looking for in biographies? What works led them to those expectations? And when was the genre fully established in China? By definition, Christology, which Chin describes as the genre of choice for modern Western theologians, deals with ontology, or the identities ascribed to Jesus. How might those identities as recorded in the writings of the Western Christological tradition from Ignatius of Antioch to Thomas Aquinas to Daphne Hampson overlap with those ascribed to the character of Jesus in Chinese biographies? Chin provides a starting point for comparison when he advises that,

Amongst the many biographies of Jesus written by Chinese writers during the first half of the twentieth century, one of the best known is Zhao Zichen’s (趙紫宸, T. C. Chao) Yesu zhuan 耶穌傳 (The Life of Jesus), which was used as a prototype for subsequent works on the same topic by such writers as Wu Leichuan (吳雷川), Xie Songgao (謝頌羔), and Zhang Shizhang (張仕章, Hottinger S. C. Chang). (4)

The critical possibilities for combining Eastern and Western criticism on the development, production networks, and reception of the genre of life writings are auspicious. Indeed, genre studies is a field significant enough in the West that the Modern Language Association adopted the term in its 2015 reformulation of the terminology by which it designates “forums” based on scholarly research interests (“Policies”).

Incisive work could be done also in coordinating the local, national, and international political contexts and affiliations to be derived from the specific words and metaphors used to refer to Jesus in just Chin’s shortlist of Chinese biographies, with both close readings and distant reading. ¹³ The next step then would be comparative between Chinese biographies of Jesus and those in other languages. Such work would coordinate the interests of those working in genre studies with those in comparative literature, for example Simon Gikandi, who notes the complications related to the literary “taxonomies connected to national projects” (1197). Andrea Walkden has contributed recently to our understanding of such literary taxonomies specifically in relation to biography. Her Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England demonstrates that bestselling English biographies participated in some of England’s key national projects during its revolutionary and post-revolutionary seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the chapter “A Year in the Life: Milton and the ‘King’s Book,’” Walkden traces a fascinating through-line of the use of descant in early modern English political and theatrical discourses. Western biblical and literary scholars regularly use the same methods of close reading and word tracking in relation to the King James Bible and the Douay–Rheims Bible to disclose Protestant and Catholic sensibilities and related political networks. So too we might parse sensibilities and networks in Chinese literary circles through tracking Chu’s and other Chinese biographers’ use of specific Chinese Bibles for quotation. Indeed, Chin’s paper mentions Chu’s Marxist interpretations of key biblical quotations, events, and figures, such as “Come and see,” “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” Passover, and Pontius Pilate (19–21, 24, 15–16, 19). I believe Eastern and Western scholars would be highly interested in subsequent work on Chin’s claim about biographies of Jesus in revolutionary and post-revolutionary China in the twentieth century, and eventually on the networks of word choices. Such work as World Literature would necessarily involve translations and Chinese originals.

I note one last promising intersection of Chin’s work in the fields he designates in his “Keywords: Sino-theology, Chinese Christology, Christian socialism, W.T Chu” and my primary field of research, Milton studies (1). Aware that Chinese personal names can be translated into various English versions, I consulted resources and found that the author of Jesus, the Proletarian, 朱維之, is known in English as both W.T. Chu and Zhu Weizhi. ¹⁴ I was simultaneously surprised and pleased because, as it turns out, the chapter dedicated to Chinese translations of Milton’s works in the collaborative volume I lead-edited, Milton in Translation, dedicates fine-tuned attention to a trio of Chinese translations of Paradise Lost, including Zhu Weizhi’s Shi leyuan 失樂園. Serendipitously, Bing Yan’s chapter on Chinese translations of Milton’s works in the volume serves to familiarize Anglophone literary critics with the name Zhu Weizhi and feel some familiarity with his Chinese translation of Milton’s two major works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, so closely affiliated with the very text, the Bible, that also so deeply informs Zhu’s/Chu’s Jesus, the Proletarian and Chin’s research. More pointedly, Yan’s chapter coordinates with Chin’s paper to prompt us to probe the matter of genre from another angle. How do literary traits operate in Zhu’s/Chu’s mid-century translation of Milton’s epic and his biography of Jesus? How do biography and epic operate within Zhu’s/Chu’s cultural context, thus accounting for his selection of these genres in particular? Yan claims that Zhu/Chu produced a Chinese translation of Milton’s Protestant epic and made specific translational choices in order to represent “the religious aspect of the work as a kind of disguise” to make Milton’s themes and poetry more palatable to both Chinese authorities and Chinese readers. Further towards that end, as Yan notes, “Zhu Weizhi’s twenty-four-page preface to his translation of Paradise Regained [featuring the Jesus figure] and Samson Agonistes starts with stressing Milton’s revolutionary thoughts and quoting Friedrich Engels’s praise of Milton for being ‘the first to defend a regicide’” (450). As much as both Yan and Chin call attention to Zhu’s/Chu’s choice of genre in terms of reader reception, they both call attention to the critical context and production of the respective genres. Specifically, Yan and Chin note how Chu domesticates and secularizes the Judeo-Christian works and figures by aligning them with Engels’s secular social criticism, with Chin drawing out the connections between Engel’s essay “On the History of Early Christianity” and Jesus, The Proletarian (11).

I have examined some of the most compelling and related strands of Chinese Marxist biblical criticism and W.T. Chu’s biography of Jesus that I derived from Chin’s paper in order to address some current obstacles to Chinese–Western literary critical exchange. My aim in doing so has been to delve into some of the most promising opportunities for facilitating future exchange and, by extension, participating in the constant evolution of literary studies. With that aim, I use this occasion not only to flesh out but also to revise my seminar response paper, as did Miller in his article based on his SJTU lecture. In my response at the Yale Seminar, I followed up on the problem of the lack of access to Chinese originals by stating that, to provide sufficient cultural context for Anglophone audiences unfamiliar with Chinese poetics, narrative style, and the like, one “alternative is for Chinese scholars to think of including English translations of long quotations of Chinese texts accompanied by Chinese originals.” I then counselled, “Unfortunately, I would not recommend this alternative at the present time, since long quotations are looked upon quite unfavorably, generally speaking, in U.S. literary critical discourse” (12). I am aware of this preference given my own reading of Hispanophone literary criticism with its regular practice of long quotations and the disfavor with which that practice is received in Anglophone literary critical circles. Further, I believe that the use of long quotations, when combined with other non-Western discursive traits, decreases the chances for approval and publication of submissions to Western journals and book presses. Nevertheless, given the compelling reasons of the lack of access to Chinese originals and the aim of synthesizing critical practices from a variety of academic cultures as we create global academic cultures, I believe that the use of carefully selected long quotations from non-native (in this case, Chinese) sources is warranted, and I encourage scholars of Chinese studies to assert their agency by including them.

The clusters of literary cultural productions comprised of, first, Miller’s talk at SJTU and the related published articles by Miller and Tanoukhi in Western-based journals and, second, of Chin’s seminar paper and journal publications in Eastern-based journals, and my response paper and this published article in Western-based arenas, indicate the deliberateness with and gangly networks within which scholars are engaging in Eastern-Western interchange today. They also attest to the force of intellectual inroads via one of the most accessible and accessed media—literature—to convert into social practices that many scholars believe to be valid and useful for creating no less than social justice and leading to greater measures of disciplinary knowledge. Further, through their content and lacunae, Tanoukhi’s and my responses serve as invitations to others, especially those holding Chinese academic cultural perspectives, to further conversations that can enhance and define the methods and aims of literary studies globally.

The aims of literary studies and of all academic disciplines are always per force in a state of flux, in order to respond to new findings, new objects, new methodologies, and their human agents. They have gained forceful attention particularly in the last two decades and within literary studies. Hence, for example, the resonance between Tanoukhi’s queries in relation to World Literature quoted at the beginning of this article and those of Haun Saussy in his introductory essay to the 2006 instantiation of the American Comparative Literature Association’s decennial disciplinary self-examinations, Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization, “What is the object of comparative literature? What is it about?” (12). The multiple responses of the volume’s contributors also resonate with Miller’s and Tanoukhi’s concerns about training engaged readers and creating engaged critics, for example, Jonathan Culler promoting “the study of literature as a discursive practice, a set of formal possibilities, thus poetics” (214) and Roland Greene stressing the aim of “issu[ing] fresh accounts of literatures under negotiation” (246). In the field of World Literature and with a focus on literary critics, or producers, Tanoukhi finds in her survey of one strand of Western literary criticism the recurrence of “surprise” in various guises as the aim, and Miller from his vast practice of it defines the aim to be “to understand and to live productively in the new uncomfortable world of global intercommunication and global wandering that Nietzsche calls ‘nomadism’” and that he finds filled with “joy” and “energy” (263–64). The emotional element is addressed as a driving force in Stanley Fish’s statement about the aims of literary studies writ large: “For me the reward and pleasure of literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward. I do it because I like the way I feel when I’m doing it” (237). Finally, according to Rita Felski’s The Uses of Literature (2008), the happiness, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—this latter term so close to Tanoukhi’s “surprise”—that can be found in literature using methods by trained and untrained or non-academic readers (perhaps synonymous with “engaged readers” and “engaged critics”) reinvigorates and instantiates the best that Marxism offers.

It is difficult to choose how we go about seeking those aims, where we put the pressure in our disciplinary and interdisciplinary aims and concomitant methodologies in our various research projects and teaching opportunities. I recognize the distinct sets that I have kept at the fore in my long-standing research projects in Milton studies and comparative literature versus those for my other recent projects: The King James Bible across Borders and Centuries (2014) and Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller (2014), for which I found World Literature models most apt. I am keen on seeing how the menu of available aims and methodologies evolve, especially as Eastern-Western interchanges continue, interchanges that will continue to involve face-to-face gatherings, published contributions like this volume of Christianity & Literature, and their engaged participants, readers, and critics.