Unit 2

English 203:  Literature of the NonWestern World

Review:

Your reading was very light for this lesson.  Poetry requires slow, careful, & repeated reading.  You also should have read the selections from Ruth Benedict's book.  Although she describes Japanese culture, the points she makes are equally true of China, especially ancient China.  You should have closely read the introduction to The Book of Songs.  Reading the background material for each lesson is very important in this course, because we are studying cultures that most of us have not had an opportunity to experience.

I used to teach in Japan where it took me a long time to understand my role.  Japanese students study English in public school for years.  Yet very few graduates can maintain even the simplest conversation in English.  You may know that there are many private English language schools in every city in Japan, featuring Western teachers.  Perhaps, like me, you would infer that your task as a university professor of English would be to make your students better at English conversation, reading, & writing.  Not so.  At least in my case, because I was a professor of American literature.  Turn to your text:
534    Citation of one of the poems was often used to clinch a point in an argument or,
        more subtly, to express an opinion that one would rather not say openly.

This passage is still not blunt enough to be intelligible.  At least as much as the British, Japan has always been an aristocratic, not a democratic, society.  The Japanese never talk about "the common denominator" or solicit the opinion of "the man in the street."  They talk about the best, being #1.  There are innumerable ways to sort out hierarchy & status.  Consider the very top end, the elite.  Money in itself is not an effective measure.  Millionaires can be as uncultured & parochial as anyone else.  (Sinclair Lewis wrote very funny novels about such American characters, coining the word Babbitt to describe them.)  Among the elite, sophisticated, adept, & razor-sharp insightful talk at various ceremonies (such as Washington, DC parties) sort out a hierarchy.  The silent listen, wishing they were as quick-witted & golden-tongued.  The talented & gifted become leaders.

In Japan having an M.A. or Ph.D. in English is a "high class" mark of distinction.  What would you think of someone in our region of Texas who had an M.A. or Ph.D. in Japanese?  You may not know "what it is good for," but I assume that you would be all the more impressed with the person; with how esoteric, uncommon, & undoubtedly smart the person is -- not to mention that they must be rich enough to pursue such esoteric interests.

The Book of Songs offered a kind of curricula or set of playing cards that the Chinese elite used in order to impress each other.  One had to know, not just the right line in the right poem, but also how to match it in order to better illuminate some situation that everyone was struggling to comprehend.

The topics of the poems we read are universal.  Most were about young love.  Others illustrated the agricultural & ritual year.  The poems that were perhaps the hardest to understand relied on Chinese cultural values that remain unknown to most of us, such as the sense of propriety in #24 in which the young woman is both proud of her sense of hsiao & yet complaining of how much sacrifice it requires.  When she confesses, "I am afraid of my father & mother," you must try to interpret what this means in the context of Chinese values & not immediately seek to interpret what it means in our contemporary Western outlook.  Far from suggesting that she is abused or terrified of her possibly abusive parents, she is actually bragging, in a way, about how high class she & her family are.  Otherwise, what we be the obstacle to eloping with her boyfriend?  So how do you "guess" that this is what is going on in the poem?  Some things are universal.  E.g., where does the ingénue live in #24?  The house has not only a walled courtyard, but orchards of willow & mulberry-trees & hard-wood trees of some kind.  Even without knowing what these trees suggest (such as silk worms that eat mulberry leaves), you know that she is from a rich family.  & if the guy is climbing over the back wall to see her, you can guess that his family is significantly lower in the prestige scale.

Without personal experience in the cultures we study, you can only hope to develop insight by close reading of both the literature & the background material describing the culture that the literature illustrates.
 
 

This is the end of unit 2.  Next week you will work through unit 3.  It will have the same structure & you will use the same navigation bar.  See you then.