Perspective and Tertium Comparationis: The Case of Asian Literature (original) (raw)

Mr. Chairman, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen: It gives me great honour to be invited to speak at this Symposium of the 51 st Annual Meeting of the JCLA. I would like to take this occasion to thank my Japanese colleagues, in particular, Professor Haga Toru, Organizer of the 13 th ICLA congress, and Professor Takayo Kano, Secretary General of the JCLA, for their kind invitation. I have come to Tokyo with the warm greetings and best regards of my colleagues in Taiwan, and on behalf of our national Association, I wish you every success in your scholarly endeavo urs. With the ICLA Tokyo congress in prospect, we are gratified to observe that this Symposium is most relevantly entitled "Inter-Asian Comparative Literature: Problems and Perspectives." Such a title clearly identifies our shared field of study, but it also raises issues which invite critical inquiry. Rather than being self-evident, our field of study is made available to us as a set of problems defined by the perspective we choose to adopt. Thus I would red the title in a reverse order: One ' s perspective helps discover problems which, in turn, give shape to his object of study. I am not unaware that by taking this position I might be accused for ceding the "field " to "perspective," for investing the viewer with primacy rather than the view itself. But this is not the occasion to reiterate and to defend my theoretical stance; what I am concerned with here is the concept of perspective. For reasons yet unknown, the word "perspective," itself not a literary terms (except in narratology), has somehow caught on, and caught us awares. But to my knowledge, no comparatist except Claudio Guillen (1971) has ever reflected on the word and its various implications. I shall briefly examine the concept, its dialectic relationship with another concept, namely, tertium comparationis, without which comparative literature would be impossible. My argument consists in the following points. First, "perspective " is such a heavily abused term-and rightly so-in our discipline that it has become semantically void, let alone optically opaque. It is time now to make the concept a little clearer, i.e., to put "perspective," hopefully, in perspective.