Occasionality: A Theory of Literary Exchange between US and China in the Nineteenth Century.

Abstract

This dissertation uses nineteenth-century Sino-American literary exchanges, both conventional and unconventional, to forward a theory of transnational uses of literature. I argue that in occasion-driven transnationalism, the literature or literary practices of the other are cited to enable a thought experiment or a political enunciation and are then set aside. I track this phenomenon in Sino-American exchanges of the long nineteenth century (1800-1910) and offer readings of the ad hoc transnational writings of Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dong Xun, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Qiu Jin and Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton). The positivist logic of the literary exchange (which authorizes them as the “proof” of transnational happenings) breaks down when we look at what literary exchange meant to historical actors whose outlooks toward transnationalism and even nationalism were not yet synchronized. Moving between analyses of literary global networks and the narratology and form of individual pieces of writing, this dissertation makes explicit that the relation between this kind of transnationalism and the logics of the uses of literature. Using other people’s literature to create conditions of thinking that nothing else can ffect produces unscripted engagements that tend, in the end, to walk away from permanent influence. In each of five chapters, I read a Chinese-US literary exchange as a case study in the theory of recessive engagement. Intransitivity happens even when (or, rather, especially when) exchanges are happening in the foreground of Sino-US relations, being touted as emblems of cross-influencing. Uncovering unlikely affinities between Chinese and American poetics, historiography, utopianism, philosophies of social activism, and transformations of the public sphere, I further argue that the history of Sino-US literary exchange in the nineteenth century is a romance of the sociality of literature. This is the belief, fueled by transnational formation, that literary contact effectively mediates political action and contemplation, as well as cross-cultural difference. Such a romance encourages the deferral to other people’s literature in the praxis of utopianism; at the same time, through its own tricks, this romance reveals and revels in the likelihood that reading other people’s works might make no difference at all.