Revising her Ph.D. dissertation in comparative literature for the University of North Carolina, where she now teaches, Zeng deconstructs Chinese natural philosophy into time, self, and language, with time as the primary rupture that triggers the other two. She considers a variety of art forms, including Taoism and Zen Buddhism, classical Chinese painting, the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, the contemporary film Farewell, My Concubine, linguistic characteristics of classical Chinese poetry, and modern American poetry. Then she analyzes in detail the work of several classical Chinese poets. The text is double spaced. Annotation :2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

DAYS OF GRACE tells the story of Ian Johns, a bleary and depressed thirty-one-year-old "professional student," who, in the throes of an early-life crisis brought on by his mother's untimely death from cancer, quits law school after surviving the rigors of its proverbially arduous first year to become an itinerant without a plan. With a voice and sensibility that can be likened to Lethem, Sedaris, Coupland and Kerouac, the book is unabashedly picaresque and Neo-Beat, written in a roman a clef and journalistic style which has been described as "modified stream-of-consciousness." It is at times dark and bittersweet but is relentlessly tinged with bright-sharp edges of humor. As we go forward with Ian on his travels and go back into the near-past to sit at his mother's deathbed in his childhood home, viewing the world through his admittedly cracked prism, we come away having learned something universal about ourselves, Y2K America and maybe even mortality itself.

Drawing on a variety of film semiotic theories, this book sheds light on works by mainland Chinese directors, Hong Kong New Wave directors, Taiwan New Cinema directors, and overseas Chinese directors. Zeng examines the cultural/historical implications of exile through the detailed analysis of film language and theoretical exploration.

This monograph takes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to 20th and 21st -century Canadian Daoist poetry, fiction and criticism in comparative, innovative and engaging ways. Of particular interest are the authors’ refreshing insights into such holistic and topical issues as the globalization of concepts of the Dao, the Yin/Yang, the Heaven-Earth-Humanity triad, the Four Greats, Five Phases, Non-action and so on, as expressed in Canadian literature and criticism – which produces Canadian-constructed Daoist poetics, ethics and aesthetics. Readers will come to understand and appreciate the social and ecological significance of, formal innovations, moral sensitivity, aesthetic principles and ideological complexity in Canadian-Daoist works.

Furthering the scholarship on writers and artists as diverse as Lord Byron, Edvard Munch, Sylvia Plath, and Jorge Luis Borges, Zeng probes the semiotics of exile. In artistic traditions the world over, exile exerts a potent and complex mythmaking power - whether it is manifest as a geographical dislocation or as a sense of cultural or psychological alienation.

This book is a life and works study of the most successful Chinese novelist of the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s-1940s, the popularity of Zhang's work among readers was immense, but it was denigrated as commercial, ideologically backward writing during an age when literature in China was dominated by the leftist politics and Europeanising aesthetics of the May Fourth Movement. The author demonstrates, by detailed philological analysis, how Zhang Henshui chose to retain the form and language of the old-style Chinese novel, but to assimilate techniques and content from May Fourth writing as a means of improving traditional fiction while catching up with the times. In this by far most comprehensive survey of Zhang's fictional work in any Western language, the author identifies, with impressive literary sensitivity, a number of phases of development and retrogression, as Zhang Henshui moved away gradually from writing fiction for entertainment and comfort to writing more disturbing and engaging work. and appendices from the most outstanding novels in exquisite English translation offer a lively impression of the experience of reading Zhang Henshui novels. The bibliography includes a most valuable detailed chronological list of Zhang's works. This book will also be of interest to scholars of Republican-era Chinese culture and history in general, as well as to scholars of comparative literature and general literary theory.

Tracing the thread of “decreation” in Chinese thought, from constantly changing classical masterpieces to fake cell phones that are better than the original. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism that means “fake,” originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir and Samsing. These cell phones were not crude forgeries but multifunctional, stylish, and as good as or better than the originals. Shanzhai has since spread into other parts of Chinese life, with shanzhai books, shanzhai politicians, shanzhai stars. There is a shanzhai Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll, in which Harry takes on his nemesis Yandomort. In the West, this would be seen as piracy, or even desecration, but in Chinese culture, originals are continually transformed—deconstructed. In this volume in the Untimely Meditations series, Byung-Chul Han traces the thread of deconstruction, or “decreation,” in Chinese thought, from ancient masterpieces that invite inscription and transcription to Maoism—“a kind a shanzhai Marxism,” Han writes. Han discusses the Chinese concepts of quan, or law, which literally means the weight that slides back and forth on a scale, radically different from Western notions of absoluteness; zhen ji, or original, determined not by an act of creation but by unending process; xian zhan, or seals of leisure, affixed by collectors and part of the picture's composition; fuzhi, or copy, a replica of equal value to the original; and shanzhai. The Far East, Han writes, is not familiar with such “pre-deconstructive” factors as original or identity. Far Eastern thought begins with deconstruction.

Abstracts of dissertations available on microfilm or as xerographic reproductions.

Now in paperback, nine lectures from Jacques Derrida that challenge the influential Marxist distinction between thinking and acting. Theory and Practice is a series of nine lectures that Jacques Derrida delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in 1976 and 1977. The topic of “theory and practice” was associated above all with Marxist discourse and particularly the influential interpretation of Marx by Louis Althusser. Derrida’s many questions to Althusser and other thinkers aim at unsettling the distinction between thinking and acting. Derrida’s investigations set out from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” in particular the eleventh thesis, which has often been taken as a mantra for the “end of philosophy,” to be brought about by Marxist practice. Derrida argues, however, that Althusser has no such end in view and that his discourse remains resolutely philosophical, even as it promotes the theory/practice pair as primary values. This seminar also draws fascinating connections between Marxist thought and Heidegger and features Derrida’s signature reconsideration of the dichotomy between doing and thinking. This text, available for the first time in English, shows that Derrida was doing important work on Marx long before Specters of Marx. As with the other volumes in this series, it gives readers an unparalleled glimpse into Derrida’s thinking at its best—spontaneous, unpredictable, and groundbreaking.