H Saussy

Biographic Data

ID50059
NAMEH Saussy
GIVEN NAMESH
FAMILY NAMESaussy
SIGNATURESAUSSY H
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Chicago
ORCID0000-0002-5220-5062
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS56
TOTAL CITATIONS15
AUTHOR COUNT56
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1993
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX2

  • Translation Goes Both Ways

    H SaussyARTICLEMinnesota Review2026

    Translation is often thought to be a one-way operation of transfer of content whereby information that exists in language A is reproduced using the words of language B. But that account is too simple. The way that a text of language A is recreated in language B may reverberate within language A and change the meaning of that text for its original public. Framing and genre, while not properly part of a text, nonetheless decide a great deal about h…

  • Plastic Before Plastic

    H SaussyARTICLEInterdisciplinary Literary Studies2025

    Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn foregrounds characteristics of plastics that in his view define the modern sensibility—in particular, mutability (plasticity), agglomeration, and the resistance of polymer bonds to breaking down. After exploring interrelated aspects of these three features, the article focuses on plasticity taken alone as the condition of possibility for the program of political and cultural reform inaugurated in Plato’s Republic (…

  • Mission imparsable

    Open AccessShadi Bartsch, H SaussyARTICLEHau Journal of Ethnographic Theory2025

  • Some Under Heaven

    Open AccessH SaussyARTICLEJournal of World Literature2024

    The extension of World Literature, a profoundly valuable concept, implies a degree of homogeneity among its objects which undermines the promise of this disciplinary field. Enlarging the scope of World Literature to include the vast corpus of Chinese writing only raises the stakes, for this corpus is internally heterogeneous, temporally differentiated, and does not always answer to the generic labels most commonly assumed in the constitution of c…

  • Langue, parole, forme, matière, différence, événement

    H SaussyARTICLETransversalités2024

    Le couple de termes théoriques langue et parole ressort de la critique que faisait Ferdinand de Saussure de la recherche sur le langage pratiqué de son temps. La parole y figure en creux : son attribut principal, c’est de ne pas être la langue (structure collective, stable, psychologique). Si l’on cherche des antécédents historiques à l’étude de la parole , la phonétique expérimentale de l’abbé Rousselot correspond bien au profil. Mais l’optique …

  • Exile, Horizons, and Poetic Language

    H SaussyARTICLESocial research2024

    Exile or banishment has long been a professional liability of intellectuals in many cultures. For practical consequences, it matters whether an offender is exiled to another polity, becoming subject to its laws, or banished to a marginal area of a single world empire. Within the Roman and Chinese Empires, banished poets narrate their predicament in ways that reflect not only their personal histories but also the resources of poetic language where…

  • War and Literary Studies

    Edith Foster, Huiwen Zhang et al.BOOKWar and Literary Studies2023

  • The poetics of text editing

    Open AccessH SaussyARTICLEDeutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für…2023

  • The Making of Barbarians

    Open AccessH SaussyBOOKMaking of Barbarians2022

  • As If You Were There

    Open AccessH SaussyARTICLEThe Cambridge Journal of…2022

    What is involved in framing a counterfactual? Let’s say I have a daydream about living in Shakespeare’s time. Who would I be and what would I do? Well, I’d go to the Globe, that much I know for sure, and bring a notebook. Of course, it is impossible for me to have lived in Shakespeare’s time, for the “me” that is having this revery is the result of genealogies, circumstances, and relationships that cannot be displaced from the second half of the …

  • China and the West” as Lore and Lure

    H SaussyARTICLETelos2022

    China and the West. I have accepted this assignment, to write something about “China and the West.”1 It calls for a deep breath. How to construe it? Of course the topic is a construct. Who calls for there to be such a topic, who needs it, who wishes it into being, in order to make what happen

  • Reading from, Reading into

    H SaussyARTICLEBamboo and Silk2021

    One of the great fascinations of excavated Chinese texts is the promise of recovering the formative stage of works that later became classics: we might then learn what later editors and interpreters have done to them, and rewrite the intellectual history of early China. But little is inevitable in the history of texts. This paper takes a single short poem from the Anhui Shijing manuscript and reads it both with and against the transmitted Mao edi…

  • Responses

    H Saussy, Harry Liebersohn et al.ARTICLEZfk - Zeitschrift für Kulturwissens…2020

  • Music and Evil

    H SaussyARTICLECritical Inquiry2020References: 2

    When Chinese literary thought is put in a global context, it is often characterized by its disinterest in mimesis and its correlative faith in the legibility of direct lyrical expression, both of which features would derive from a general epistemic optimism common to all schools of Chinese thought. Early writing on music, however, attests to a distrust of the art and to a consequent urge for reform. Suspicious mimesis, linked with the promotion o…

  • Political Enchantments

    Gloria Davies, Christian Sorace et al.ARTICLECritical Inquiry2020References: 1

    The special issue’s editors introduce the rationale for the following articles, all of which take up aspects of the relations among the production of artworks, the behavior of audiences, and the state’s interest in assembling, regulating, and transforming what it knows as its people through the responses to art

  • Jueju

    H SaussyARTICLENew Literary History2019

    Jueju Haun Saussy (bio) Short forms are synecdochic: they suggest and imply more than they say. Not that one would wish them longer. Franz Kafka's parables in two or three sentences are perfect as they are and would gain nothing from the Hollywood treatment. Brevity can convey a rejection of long forms as boring (Callimachus: "I hate your Epic Cycle") or despotic (the family tree of concepts of organic form includes totalitarian as well as holist…

  • Master Zhuang’s blue guitar

    H SaussyARTICLEAsia Pacific Translation and…2018

    The standard definition of translation as the rendering, in one language, of content originally formulated in another language is insufficient to describe some situations that closely approximate translation and sometimes attend it. When the translated texts result from a chain of sequential rewritings, only some early phases of which had any context with a foreign-language original, does the name “translation” apply to all links of the chain or …

  • The Comparative History of East Asian Literatures

    Open AccessH SaussyARTICLEModern Languages Open2018

    “World literature,” one of the growth fields in contemporary comparative literature, often begs the question of the “world” it reflects. Here it is suggested that East Asia from around 400 BCE to 1800 CE constituted a domain of circulation of literary, religious and philosophical texts that can well be taken as a “world.” Consequences for the future of comparative literary studies are intimated

  • Listening to Krishna

    Open AccessH SaussyARTICLEHistory and Theory2018

    McComas Taylor's Seven Days of Nectar offers a contrastive description of three seven-day performances of the traditional Sanskrit text Bhāgavatapurāna in different locations and with different sponsorship, bringing out the special characteristics of each as a variant of living textual practice. The book also contains reports of interviews with reciters, detailing their backgrounds, education, and aspirations. This performance tradition has prosp…

  • Translation as Citation

    H SaussyBOOKTranslation As Citation2017

    Translation as Citation denies that translating amounts to the composition, in one language, of statements equivalent to statements previously made in another. Rather, translation works with elements of the language and culture in which it arrives, often reconfiguring them irreversibly: it creates, with a fine disregard for precedent, loan words, calques, forced metaphors, forged pasts, imaginary relationships, and dialogues of the dead. Creativi…

  • The “First Age” of Translation

    H SaussyBOOKTranslation As Citation2017

    Buddhist ideas were transmitted to China over a period of several hundred years, originally via Central Asia and later through direct contact with Indian believers. Translation was essential to this process of conversion—arguably the most consequential in world history—but the mechanisms of translation remain unfamiliar. Documents indicate that for the first three centuries of Buddhist influence, source texts in Indic languages were almost never …

  • Matteo Ricci the Daoist

    H SaussyBOOKTranslation As Citation2017

    When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in China in the 1580s, he had to invent an identity for himself: he and his doctrine were unknowns. That would soon change as Ricci became a Ming-dynasty celebrity through his writings in Chinese and personal contacts. From an examination of contemporary writings about Ricci in Chinese, a constellation of references emerges that depict him, through repeated references to the Zhuangzi and associated tex…

  • The Extravagant Zhuangzi

    H SaussyBOOKTranslation As Citation2017

    The Chinese philosophical text Zhuangzi is said to be the work of one Zhuang Zhou (4th century BCE), about whom little is known. Critical work on the text of the Zhuangzi usually attributes the “inner” or core chapters to Zhuang Zhou and the rest to his “school.” The historical texts, however, give little reason to believe that the “inner chapters” are the earliest. If the supposed author is merely a name affixed to a stance of radical skepticism…

  • Historiography in the Chinese Twentieth Century

    H Saussy, Ge Zhaoguang et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Modern…2016

    The modernist, critical turn in Chinese historiography in the first years of the twentieth century created space for new categories, narrative frameworks, and kinds of explanation. The generation of the 1910s and 1920s took advantage of this, offering new conceptions of the distant origins of Chinese civilization and suggesting different ways of narrating China’s development, one of which was the coexistence and interaction of ethnic groups. Unde…

  • Trying to Make It Real

    David Damrosch, H Saussy et al.ARTICLEComparative Literature Studies2016Cited by: 1References: 2

    Historian Takashi Shogimen, bioethicist Jing-Bao Nie, and I established this research group several years earlier to promote dialogue about theories and methodologies of comparison across diverse fields from psychology to anthropology, history to bioethics. Haun's talk itself followed a roundtable discussion in which Haun and Zhang Longxi joined with Otago colleagues from all these disciplines to discuss how each field's engagement with questions…