01
Questions to keep thinking about
Zhang Hui is a professor at the Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture at Peking University.
Zhang Hui: Most of the year was spent writing a new book about G.E. Lessing (1729-1781). It has been written for ten years and is in the stage of finishing. Thanks to Lessing, he gave me the possibility of looking at myself and even at our time. That's probably what we desperately need. Because, often, "do not know the true face of Lushan Mountain, only because we are in this mountain"; because we may have largely lost the frame of reference for seeing ourselves and our own times.
Li Shuangzhi is a young researcher in the German Department of Fudan University.
Li Shuangzhi: The question I continue to think about in 2021 is whether taking literary research as a career can help more people, including themselves, change their one-dimensional lives.
02
Books to watch
Wang Min'an is a professor at the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University.
Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China's Mountain South. China's diverse natural conditions and living customs have enabled residents of different regions of China to form unique medical experience and ethnic medicine. Judith Farquhar and Lai Lili, authors of "Collecting Medicines," spent six years observing and documenting the medical experiences of seven ethnic minorities in the mountains of southern China (Guangxi, Yunnan, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, and Hainan): how to collect medicinal herbs and form endemic healing techniques.
In this ethnography of intellectual diversity, the two authors present up close to contemporary Chinese understanding of ethnicity, endemicity, body, and nature. This book examines important historical moments in the development of "national medicine", and also makes a profound interpretation of local medical practices scattered in rural areas of China, providing a new perspective on the diversity of medicine in China.
Zhang Hui: My reading is still mainly based on old books, reading books around my own interests and problem awareness, so I don't particularly care about which books have caused heated discussions. The "Literature and Thought Translation Series" edited by my colleague Professor Zhang Pei and I for the Commercial Press is mostly selected by some old books that are "lukewarm and lukewarm".
Here, I would like to recommend two more small books worth reading, both of which have not yet been translated into Chinese. One is Northrop Frye's pamphlet, titled The Educated Imagination, I wonder if it would be appropriate to translate it as "Educated Imagination"? This is a transcript of the author's radio talk at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which itself lasted six and a half hours, with six sections and 156 pages. It mainly discusses the significance of humanities, especially literature, education in the technological age. I sometimes naively think that imagination is probably the scarcest resource of our time, and it is therefore an indispensable prerequisite for us to "break through the cage" and overcome our arrogance.
Cultivating Imagination, by [plus] Northrop Fry, translator: Li Xuefei, edition: Nanjing University Press, August 2021
The title of the second book is Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, written by jacques Barzun, the famous author of From Dawn to Decline: 500 Years of Life in Western Culture. I remember that when the linguist Mr. Zhu Dexi talked about the requirements for good articles, he also said the same meaning as Bazan: one is accurate, and the other is nature. Today, a concise and direct expression may also be a scarce resource in another sense. Writing words that even you don't want to read and can't understand is not only disrespectful to the reader, but it can even be said to be the foci of some kind of spiritual disease of the times. Problems are seen in the subtleties, and the opportunity for change may also be found at the end.
Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers，作者:Jacques Barzun，版本: University Of Chicago Press 1994年6月
Li Shuangzhi: I have always felt that what has been valuable for introduction is Hermann Broch's "Hoffmannsthal and His Time". Taking the Austrian poet Hoffmannstahl as a clue, the book outlines the cultural and psychological state of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fully demonstrating Bloch's talent and wisdom, and is a classic of a generation, which was included in Bloom's "Western Canon".
03
Looking forward to the original work
Zhang Hui: I look forward to imaginative works, and I look forward to articles and works that "speak people's words".
Li Shuangzhi: I hope to see more modern poets and writers in China's commentaries, such as Mu Dan and Shi Jingcun.