書系名稱：East-West Cultural Encounters in Literature & Cultural StudiesTHE TAO OF S is an engaging study of American racialization of Chinese and Asians, Asian American writing, and contemporary Chinese cultural production, stretching from the nineteenth century to the present. Sheng-mei Ma examines the work of nineteenth-century “Sinophobic” American writers, such as Bret Harte, Jack London, and Frank Norris, and twentieth-century “Sinophiliac” authors, such as John Steinbeck and Philip K. Dick, as well as the movies Crazy Rich Asians and Disney’s Mulan and a host of contemporary Chinese authors, to illuminate how cultural stereotypes have swung from fearmongering to an overcompensating exultation of everything Asian. Within this framework Ma employs the Taoist principle of yin and yang to illuminate how roles of the once-dominant American hegemony—the yang—and the once-declining Asian civilization—the yin—are now, in the twenty-first century, turned upside down as China rises to writ
本書特色Analyzing authors by analyzing the words they use;Revealing the person behind the pages by revealing the condition of language.序【Acknowledgements】 I want to thank Mr. Michael Song, the President of Showwe Publisher (Taipei, Taiwan), for his encouragement and his thoughtfulness. My thanks also go to Irene Cheng and Lestat Yin for making this book possible.【Preface】 The initial idea of writing such a book on the condition of language comes from a question, which was asked by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, What is Literature? In fact, Sartre truly wanted to ask himself and the readers, this essential question - 'What is Writing'? In Sartre's Words, again, he mentioned the way in which Charles Schweitzer was 'amazed' (Sartre 89) by the French language. In some ways, Schweitzer did not consider himself 'as a writer' - he 'played' with the language, and yet, 'had not quite made it his own' (Sartre 89). Sartre's words indicate that to write in a specific language - as a writer - firstl
