Profound Thought: Rorty on two desires

Quoted in Testiminio: The Politics of Truth, by John Beverly (2):

There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives. The first is by telling the story of their contributions to a community. This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary one, consisting perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from history or fiction or both. The second way is to describe themselves as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality. This relation is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe, or their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity.

Book: Polygamy and Sublime Passion

Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (University of Hawaii, 2010)

[On Honglou fumeng a 19th century sequel to Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) ] Even though Baoyu now has twelve wives, he is fair to all, harboring no favorites. Reborn as Mengyu, he is all "sentiment" and no "lust" (that is, all qing and no se), as the narrator describes in a stunning take-off on the motif of gender fluidity, such that when he consorts with this wives and maids, "he is not even aware that he is female and they are female. ... Even if one of the women is sponging herself or taking a bath, he comes and goes as he pleases and no one minds... 

[On Qilou chongmeng and Honglou huanmeng, other sequels of the 19th century] In both, Baoyu resembles the sexually active polygamist of Ming and Qing erotic novels who enjoys cozy and harmonious relations with them all his wives. ... He has five wives by age sixteen...Before marriage, he learns the trick of having sex with prepubescent girls, especially maids, so that none will get pregnant. He learns erotic arts form a nineteen-year-old female acrobat, after which he practices the arts with a new group of twenty-four maids, of whom he takes four each night... (Chapter 2, "Qing Can be With One and Only One" 39-40)

Jobs: Common Interview Question 1: 1. What attracted you to this position?

Pass 1: 

B__ University combines the best of a research institution and a liberal arts college. There’s the East Asian Studies major, which is hard at work producing equities analysts, hospital managers, political scientists, and so forth, and there’s the department of German, Russian and Asian languages, which is clearly an outstanding home base for cultural exchange among specialists in language education and the role of literature and the arts in society. I’m interested in doing cross-cultural translation and thinking through the big questions offered up by a deep consideration of art and language, and also in imparting the urgency of this work to young people even if — especially if — they will be making their new knowledge just one part of a larger liberal arts experience intended to prepare them for leadership and innovation in fields far beyond literature and the arts.

Jobs: Common Interview Questions

1. What attracted you to this position?
2.  How can your courses assist our institution in strategic goal (to increase equity, diversity, social justice, sustainability, etc.)
3. What was your greatest teaching challenge?
4. How is your work interdisciplinary?
5. This position calls for a teaching load and an active research agenda. How will you balance these two things?
6. Please describe your research plans for the next five years.

Bibliography: Polygamy and Sublime Passion

McMahon, Keith. Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity. (University of Hawaii, 2010).

Singapore edition of Heroic Sons and Daughters, a major Confucian Romance.

For centuries, polygamy was a basic organizing principle of Chinese families, and so romance stories in China need not denigrate "polygynous-philanderers," and "remarkable women" can organize concubines for their men with no loss to their virtue, at least in theory. Drawing on Lacan's analysis of narrative as fantasy, McMahon reads a wide variety of late Imperial Chinese literature to show us the tension between the deeply conservative Confucian patriarchy and a rapidly emerging native form of romanticism -- what McMahon calls "qing egalitarianism." Accepting McMahon's model of qing egalitarianism, I show how Yang Jiang's fiction and essay merge the model of the "remarkable woman" with still more notions of sexuality and family responsibility inherited from the Western picaresque and comedies of manners. Where McMahon concludes by saying that China's heritage of polygamy continues to exert a "shadowy influence" on sexuality in China today, I argue that Yang Jiang's appropriation of the category of "remarkable woman" is one way that Confucian notions of virtue inform her social and political values.

Poem: "Gatha" 偈 by Sikong Tu

"Gatha" 偈 means Buddhist devotional verse, though as my advisor comments this one by Sikong Tu 司空图 (837-908) is not very Buddhist (my advisor's translation):

Photo via John Pappas

人若憎时我亦憎，
逃名最要是无能。
 后生乞汝残风月，
自作深林不语僧。

 If others hate the times
      then I too hate them:
To flee from fame the vital thing
      is to have no talent.
Later generations! I beg you,
      to lay waste to your sensual urges,
And turn yourselves into silent monks,
      who dwell in the deep woods.

. Funny it seems so simple, yet neither of us are sure how the lines all go together.

Story: "The Real Story of Ah Q"

‘Hurrah for revolution!’ Ah-Q thought. ‘It’ll do for the whole rotten lot of them!…I’m going over to the revolutionaries as soon as I get the chance.’ His sense of grievance against the world sharpened first by the rather embarrassed circumstances in which he had recently found himself, and second by the two midday bowls of wine he had drunk on an empty stomach, Ah-Q floated ruminatively along his way. -- Lu Xun, "The Real Story of Ah-Q," tr. Julia Lovell (Penguin and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (Penguin Classics, 2010) (p. 109).