C. T. Hsia on Chinese Literature. By C. T. Hsia. [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 544 pp. £26.50. ISBN 0-231-12990-4.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 179 ◽  
pp. 825-827
Author(s):  
Chloë Starr
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Dust Jacket ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

First impressions matter when buying a book; they are less important when chasing up a reference in a library or following a reading list to a book shop. C.T. Hsia on Chinese Literature is a serious tome which looks like a biography – a bust portrait of the octogenarian author smiles out of a stark black and white dust jacket, and the playful title leaves ambiguous whether it is C. T. Hsia or his thoughts we are buying. One of the delights of reputation and seniority is the publication of a lifetime's collected essays. This produces a gift to the reader which takes its rightful place as a history of criticism as well as literary criticism, gathering 16 essays published between 1962 (in The China Quarterly) and 1990, a volume for celebration. As undergraduates of modern Chinese literature, we used to groan when C. T. Hsia appeared on reading lists, as much because the works containing the essays were dog-eared, smelly old volumes, as for their polemicism. Publication in a smart, single volume presents easy access and allows the essays to be contemplated for their merit and range. Since C. T. Hsia has been considered, as Patrick Hanan writes, “without question the most influential critic of Chinese fiction since the 1960s,” his essays remain important reading matter.

The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. Edited by Victor Mair. [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 1,342+xxiv pp. $75.00; £52.50. ISBN 0-231-10984-9.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 178 ◽  
pp. 535-536
Author(s):  
Bernhard Fuehrer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
General Readership ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literature History ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Philosophical Writings

Following his Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (1994) and the Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (2000), the Columbia History of Chinese Literature intends to complement these two widely used readers. Edited by Victor H. Mair, the 55 chapters of this single-volume history of Chinese literature are chronologically arranged with thematic chapters interspersed. Indeed, a closer look at the chapters reveals that the book at hand follows the traditional dictum of wen shi zhe bu fenjia, i.e. that literature, history and philosophy should not be separated but regarded as one field of studies. Hence the scope of this history goes far beyond the scope of what is traditionally subsumed under the heading of literature. In addition to the topics (all genres and periods of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama) that one expects in a book of this sort, wit and humour, proverbs and rhetoric, historical and philosophical writings, classical exegesis, literary theory and criticism, traditional fiction commentary, as well as popular culture, the impact of religion upon literature, the role of women, and the relationship with non-Chinese languages and peoples (ethnic minorities, Korea, Japan, Vietnam) feature as topics of individual chapters.Most of the chapters are written by leading specialists in those areas and are highly informative as well as concisely presented. Moreover, a number of chapters are thought-provoking enough to inspire questions that may lead towards a more focused research on hitherto neglected or less well-documented topics. In this sense, The Columbia History of Chinese Literature may also be perceived as a potential major impetus for further developments in the study of pre-modern and modern Chinese literature and related fields. Since the volume aims at bringing the riches of China's literary tradition into focus for a general readership, the majority of chapters can probably be best described as outlines of specific developments that should encourage readers to consult more specialized publications.

The ‘Brazilian Connection’ in the History of American Linguistics

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-382
Author(s):  
Cristina Altman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
South American ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Structural Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

Summary When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), who had come from Brazil where he had done ethnological work, met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, of which, the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) was much more consequential, at least as far as the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America generally during the 1950s and the 1960s is concerned. Mattoso Câmara came to the United States and spent most of his time in New York City (September 1943 till April 1944), where he got exposure to Praguean type structuralism, notably through Jakobson’s lectures he attended at Columbia University and at the École Libre of New York, which had been established by European refugees at the time. He also participated in the first meetings of the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as one of its co-founders. Following his return to Rio de Janeiro, Mattoso Câmara proposed, in 1949, as his doctoral thesis a phonemic description of Brazilian Portuguese. The work was published a few years later, in 1953. His most influential work, Princípios de Lingüística Gerai, first published in 1954, had two more revised and updated editions (1958, 1967) and served to introduce several generations of Brazilian as well as other South American students to structural linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s.

scholarly journals Paul Lazarsfeld's Contributions to the History of Empirical Social Research

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hynek Jeřábek
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Research

During the 1960s Paul F. Lazarsfeld, co-founder of the renowned Columbia school, worked to promote a useful new research methodology. This paper analyses these activities. In a series of papers, Lazarsfeld demonstrated that the roots of empirical research, the useful methodology he developed, lie in the work of early European scholars. Building on his belief that quantification does not need numbers, he showed that Hermann Conring, with his “classificatory statistics,” had predated Frédéric Le Play and his “ family budgets” and Adolphe Quételet and his “probability statistics” by almost two centuries. In another paper he highlighted the importance of Max Weber’s empirical studies on agrarian and industrial workers within the frame of his life work. His seminars at Columbia University with Robert K. Merton and at the Sorbonne with Raymond Boudon opened up transatlantic cooperation on empirical research between New York and Paris for decades to come.

scholarly journals Roman Jakobson

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Thomas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The 1960S

Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896–1982) famously characterized himself as a “Russian philologist. Period.” He arranged for his gravestone to be engraved simply with the words “Roman Jakobson—RUSSKIJ FILOLOG.” Jakobson’s Russianness, and his love of language and literature, are beyond dispute. However, his intellectual contributions far exceed the intersection of the two terms of his self-description. Jakobson was a dynamic and protean scholar, who wrote about Poetics, Phonology, historical linguistics (especially Slavic), morphosyntax, semiotics, psycholinguistics, and cultural and literary history. He participated avidly in a succession of scholarly collaboratives which generated ideas about language and literature that radiated outward to other thinkers and disciplines. In a first and formative instance, Jakobson was a precocious member of the avant garde literary-artistic Futurist movement in Moscow in the 1910s. In 1926, he co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle, which developed a distinctive response to the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (b. 1857–d. 1913) that was then spreading across Europe. Following his immigration to America in 1941, Jakobson co-founded the Linguistic Circle of New York and taught at the French-Belgian university in exile, the École Libre des Hautes Études, before joining the faculty of Columbia University (in 1946), Harvard (in 1949), and MIT (in 1957, concurrent with his appointment at Harvard). Working steadily into his eighties through these successive dislocations, Jakobson produced a flood of texts and lectures addressed to diverse audiences, often coauthored with colleagues or former students. Much of his attention went to close linguistic analysis of literature, with a special focus on the formal linguistic features and sound patterns of poetry. A second theme was his work in phonology, especially in his collaboration with fellow Russian émigré and Prague Circle member Nikolai Trubetzkoy (b. 1890–d. 1938). Jakobson resolved phonemes into bundles of hierarchically organized distinctive features, emphasizing acoustic over articulatory definitions, in which one member has default or “unmarked” status relative to the other. The notion of distinctive features influenced generative phonology and other approaches in the 1960s, although Jakobson’s contributions are not always acknowledged. Another of Jakobson’s most significant accomplishments was his role in transmitting structuralism from Europe to the United States, especially during his residence in New York when his lectures on Saussure at the École Libre influenced anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908–d. 2009). Through Jakobson, structuralist ideas passed to Lévi-Strauss, and then to sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, and 20th-century humanities in general, before meeting opposition from poststructuralism in the late 1960s.

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