Andrea Bachner
Biographic Data
| ID | 642451 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrea Bachner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrea |
| FAMILY NAME | Bachner |
| SIGNATURE | BACHNER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 31 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Disoriented Disciplines
Rosario Hubert’s Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature joins the still select but increasing (and increasingly important) corpus of cultural analyses of the interactions between Chinese and Latin American cultures. It does so mainly from the methodological perspective of world literature, namely by tracing and reflecting on some of the complex histories of cultural circulation from China to Latin America…
Predator Comparison
Comparison is predation: a violent severing, a forced fusion, a deadly contest of forces. Or this, at least, seems to be the specter that haunts Comparative Literature. The fraught legacies of Comparative Literature often impel methodological reflection into binaries of bad versus good comparison. This also leads us frequently to connect, maybe too closely, a certain way of doing comparison and its potential political value. This essay starts a r…
Transregional Critique and the Challenge of Comparison
In spite of their long history of contact, exchange, and dialogue, Chinese and Latin American cultures constitute a challenge for comparative, transregional, and world-literary thought. By drawing on examples of literary and cultural contact between these two cultures that emerge through a closer look at the 1965 novel Farabeuf by Mexican writer Salvador Elizondo, this chapter will diagnose some of the challenges of comparative, relational, and w…
Introduction
Ecologising Taiwan means to think ecologically about, from, as well as by way of Taiwan. On the one hand, we ecologise Taiwan by viewing it through an ecological perspective; on the other hand, we also want to treat Taiwan itself as an agent that drives our thinking, no longer merely an object of our anthropocentric and anthropocenic gaze. Taiwan, as an island that encompasses a particularly wide range of biotopes, redefines insularity in its con…
The Mark of Theory
From China to Hong Kong with Horror Transcultural Consumption in Fruit Chan’s Dumplings
Fruit Chan’s 2004 film Dumplings (Jiaozi) tells a macabre tale in which rejuvenation comes at the price of ingesting human foetuses, made palatable in the form of dumplings by the former Mainland gynaecologist turned miracle-dumpling vendor, Aunt Mei. But Chan’s film does not only exploit the genre of food film for the purpose of cannibalistic horror. His film – released both in a shorter version as part of the Three Extremes omnibus and in a fea…
A New Literary History of Modern China
At the Margins of the Minor
Taiwanese indigenous literatures, the literatures of the Austronesian, indigenous cultures of Taiwan, mainly written in Chinese, constitute ultraminor literatures at the margins of Taiwanese culture which is itself at the margins of Chinese-language culture. This essay uses the case of Taiwanese indigenous literatures as the basis for a reflection on the notion of literary minority. It argues that the example of Taiwanese indigenous literatures d…
Remapping the Transpacific
vi Editors' Introduction Andrea Bachner and Pedro Erber Remapping the Transpacific: Critical Approaches between Asia and Latin America Asia and the Americas no longer occupy the disconnected extremes of an imagined map. Nor do they continue to embody the antipodes of East and West, framing Europe as the symbolic center. Rather, accelerated by recent geopolitical and global economic shifts, the transpacific has emerged as a space of intense transc…
Violent Media, Chinese Fantasies
17 Translation Translated by Andrea Bachner Violent Media, Chinese Fantasies: Salvador Elizondo’s “Execution by Shooting in China” The short essay “Execution by Shooting in China” (“Fusilamiento en China”) that Mexican writer Salvador Elizondo (1932–2006) published in Writer’s Notebook (Cuaderno de escritura) in 1969 brings together some of the main concerns of Elizondo’s aesthetic and theoretical universe: the links between violence, mediality,…
Approaches between Asia and Latin America
55 Field Trip Curated by Andrea Bachner and Christopher Bush Approaches between Asia and Latin America: A Critical Renga 6 Framework Christopher Bush The conceit of a “critical renga” was loosely inspired by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson’s 1969 quadrilingual experiment in poetic composition Renga, itself loosely modeled on the Japanese poetic genre of that name. This form of “linked verse” became a major …
Beyond Satire
Zhang Guangyu’s illustrated tale Journey to the West in Cartoons (1945) has been described as a colorful, whimsical, but also trenchant lampoon of bankrupt politics and society under Nationalist rule at the close of the War of Resistance against Japan. Journey is indeed a masterful example of satire, but it is also a remarkable work of manhua , a genre of verbal-visual art often referred to as “cartoon” that flourished in China’s treaty ports in …
Travels in Modern China
Travels in modern China are not only about displacement and exile, but are in many ways informed by a complicated sense of inadequacy and betrayal, as the desire to stay close (or return) to the fatherland is constantly frustrated and negated. This chapter argues that modern Chinese intellectuals and writers—belated but nevertheless ubiquitous and mobile travelers—are often shaped by a profound sense of psychosocial deprivation, reluctance, and l…
Early Modern Comparative Approaches to Literary Early Modernity
Modern Chinese literature is often understood as marking a self-consciously cosmopolitan departure from a long and largely autochthonous literary tradition. The binary between “modern” and “traditional” implicit in this view forecloses the possibility of reading individual works and broader literary developments in the late Ming and early Qing alongside European counterparts as part of a shared early modernity. After reviewing the emergence of an…
On Time
Through a close reading of several works by contemporary Hong Kong author Dung Kai-Cheung, and particularly his recent novel Works and Creations , this chapter examines how Dung deploys a dialectics of anticipatory loss and belated recognition to comment not only on the status of contemporary Hong Kong but also on the process of fiction-writing itself. The analysis draws on the precisely inverse Freudian concepts of the fetish and of deferred act…
Reading Lu Xun’s Early Essays in Relation to Marxism
Lu Xun was claimed and canonized as a Marxist by the Chinese Communist Party, while Japanese and Western critics frequently read his work as a critique of modernity. Whereas the latter approach tends to trace the continuity in his writings, the Marxist approach largely brackets his earlier work. This chapter attempts to bring Marxist theory in dialogue with Lu Xun’s work in a different way, by focusing on his early writings and reading them in re…
Sense of Place and Urban Images
Through a close reading of works by a number of different Hong Kong poets, this chapter analyzes how the poets construct an identity for themselves and their place by finding expression for their urban experience. The analysis focuses on North Point and Nathan Road—two of the busiest districts in Hong Kong—and their position within the poetic imagination. Paying particular attention to poetry’s sociohistorical function as a construction site of c…
Hongkong-Speak
Cantonese has been used in “spoken drama” performances since the 1910s, but scripts (both original scripts and ones translated from other languages) were almost invariably written in standard Mandarin. Taking as its starting point the work of Rupert Chan, who was among the first to translate Western plays into colloquial Cantonese, this chapter examines some of the implications of the use of written Cantonese in contemporary Hong Kong. Of particu…
Structure and Rupture in Literary History and Historiography
In rethinking modern Chinese literary history, we may draw on insights from two relatively new approaches in the West: postmodern literary history as represented by the Harvard University Press’s “new history” series, and comparative literary history as realized in two multivolume literary histories on Central-Eastern Europe and Latin America, respectively. It is time to move research forward beyond the current divergence between a persistent lac…
A Dream of Returning to 1997
This chapter analyzes the Chinese web fantasy novel A Dream of Returning to 1997, created and serialized between 2004 and 2005 by the pseudonymous author Tonglingzhe, as a basis for reflecting upon the medial and commercial pragmatics as well as the ideological framework of web literature. With its plot of a web fantasy aficionado who achieves literary and economic success only after traveling back in time and reaping the fruits of his earlier un…
The Story of Literary History
Starting with a reflection on Lu Xun’s ambivalence toward the writing of literary history, this chapter analyzes the emergence and importance of literary history as a discursive tool for structuring the production and transmission of knowledge about literature from the late Qing onward. In the context of China’s transition to a Western-style educational system in the early twentieth century, reinforced by a turn of intellectuals from literary rev…
A Distant Shore
What relation does or should a descendant of immigrant parents have to the ancestral homeland? And what notions can he or she rely on to characterize, sustain, or even nullify such relations—language, ethnicity, consanguinity, or cultural loyalty? The Chinese Singaporean writer Chia Joo Ming ponders and casts new lights on these questions in his novella “Ambon Vacation.” For Chia, Chinese diasporic subjects have open-ended and plural identities t…
Hao Ran and the Cultural Revolution
This chapter offers a close reading of several works by Liang Jinguang, better known as Hao Ran, contextualizing his work within a tradition of Maoist “cultural revolution” that led up to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. Although Hao Ran’s works might appear to be replete with socialist ideology, this chapter argues that the socialist content in his works is actually complicated by the literary tropes and images he us…
Conclusion
As conclusion to the Handbook , this chapter reflects on the ways in which Chinese literary studies can and does inform the broader fields of literary studies and the humanities as such. In the past decades, Chinese literary studies has been experiencing a double perspectival shift: on one hand it has extended and expanded the scope of the field with ever more complex definitions of “Chineseness,” on the other, it has striven to integrate itself …
Malaysia as Method
Set during a 1987 police crackdown on protestors challenging the discriminatory policies of the Malaysian government, Malaysian Chinese author Xiao Hei’s “A Literary Record of October 27 and Other Things” (1989) uses postcolonial Malaysia’s thirtieth national anniversary to reflect upon institutionalized ethnolinguistic minoritization. Through intertextual citation, Xiao Hei’s novella not only constitutes a collaborative historical record of Ma H…
Approaches between Asia and Latin America
55 Field Trip Curated by Andrea Bachner and Christopher Bush Approaches between Asia and Latin America: A Critical Renga 6 Framework Christopher Bush The conceit of a “critical renga” was loosely inspired by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson’s 1969 quadrilingual experiment in poetic composition Renga, itself loosely modeled on the Japanese poetic genre of that name. This form of “linked verse” became a major …
New Spaces for Literature
Research Article| January 01 2005 New Spaces for Literature: Can Xue and Hélène Cixous on Writing Andrea Bachner Andrea Bachner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2005) 42 (3): 155–182. https://doi.org/10.2307/40247490 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andrea Bachner; New Spaces for Literature: Can Xue and Hélène Cixous on Writing. Comparative Literatur…
Thomas Hettche's Wound Ethics
This essay analyzes the work of Thomas Hettche as the combination of an attention to corporeality with an attempt at developing an alternative ethics. Like several other writers in the context of the turn to the body in recent German writing, Hettche probes medical metaphors, especially dissection, prosthetics, and incubation. For him, however, the body is not only “Schnittfläche,” a cut—and cutting—surface, but a “Schnittstelle,” an interface wh…
Chinese” Intextuations of the World
Research Article| January 01 2010 “CHINESE” INTEXTUATIONS OF THE WORLD Andrea Bachner Andrea Bachner Ohio State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2010) 47 (3): 318–345. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.47.3.0318 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andrea Bachner; “CHINESE” INTEXTUATIONS OF THE WORLD. Comparative Literature Studies 1 Janu…
Beyond Sinology
"Beyond Sinology" published on by Columbia University Press.
Beyond Sinology
Corpographies2. Iconographies3. Sonographies4. Allographies5. TechnographiesConclusion: Beyond SinologyNotesBibliographyIndex
Beyond Satire
Zhang Guangyu’s illustrated tale Journey to the West in Cartoons (1945) has been described as a colorful, whimsical, but also trenchant lampoon of bankrupt politics and society under Nationalist rule at the close of the War of Resistance against Japan. Journey is indeed a masterful example of satire, but it is also a remarkable work of manhua , a genre of verbal-visual art often referred to as “cartoon” that flourished in China’s treaty ports in …
Travels in Modern China
Travels in modern China are not only about displacement and exile, but are in many ways informed by a complicated sense of inadequacy and betrayal, as the desire to stay close (or return) to the fatherland is constantly frustrated and negated. This chapter argues that modern Chinese intellectuals and writers—belated but nevertheless ubiquitous and mobile travelers—are often shaped by a profound sense of psychosocial deprivation, reluctance, and l…
Early Modern Comparative Approaches to Literary Early Modernity
Modern Chinese literature is often understood as marking a self-consciously cosmopolitan departure from a long and largely autochthonous literary tradition. The binary between “modern” and “traditional” implicit in this view forecloses the possibility of reading individual works and broader literary developments in the late Ming and early Qing alongside European counterparts as part of a shared early modernity. After reviewing the emergence of an…
On Time
Through a close reading of several works by contemporary Hong Kong author Dung Kai-Cheung, and particularly his recent novel Works and Creations , this chapter examines how Dung deploys a dialectics of anticipatory loss and belated recognition to comment not only on the status of contemporary Hong Kong but also on the process of fiction-writing itself. The analysis draws on the precisely inverse Freudian concepts of the fetish and of deferred act…
Reading Lu Xun’s Early Essays in Relation to Marxism
Lu Xun was claimed and canonized as a Marxist by the Chinese Communist Party, while Japanese and Western critics frequently read his work as a critique of modernity. Whereas the latter approach tends to trace the continuity in his writings, the Marxist approach largely brackets his earlier work. This chapter attempts to bring Marxist theory in dialogue with Lu Xun’s work in a different way, by focusing on his early writings and reading them in re…
Sense of Place and Urban Images
Through a close reading of works by a number of different Hong Kong poets, this chapter analyzes how the poets construct an identity for themselves and their place by finding expression for their urban experience. The analysis focuses on North Point and Nathan Road—two of the busiest districts in Hong Kong—and their position within the poetic imagination. Paying particular attention to poetry’s sociohistorical function as a construction site of c…
Hongkong-Speak
Cantonese has been used in “spoken drama” performances since the 1910s, but scripts (both original scripts and ones translated from other languages) were almost invariably written in standard Mandarin. Taking as its starting point the work of Rupert Chan, who was among the first to translate Western plays into colloquial Cantonese, this chapter examines some of the implications of the use of written Cantonese in contemporary Hong Kong. Of particu…
Structure and Rupture in Literary History and Historiography
In rethinking modern Chinese literary history, we may draw on insights from two relatively new approaches in the West: postmodern literary history as represented by the Harvard University Press’s “new history” series, and comparative literary history as realized in two multivolume literary histories on Central-Eastern Europe and Latin America, respectively. It is time to move research forward beyond the current divergence between a persistent lac…
A Dream of Returning to 1997
This chapter analyzes the Chinese web fantasy novel A Dream of Returning to 1997, created and serialized between 2004 and 2005 by the pseudonymous author Tonglingzhe, as a basis for reflecting upon the medial and commercial pragmatics as well as the ideological framework of web literature. With its plot of a web fantasy aficionado who achieves literary and economic success only after traveling back in time and reaping the fruits of his earlier un…
The Story of Literary History
Starting with a reflection on Lu Xun’s ambivalence toward the writing of literary history, this chapter analyzes the emergence and importance of literary history as a discursive tool for structuring the production and transmission of knowledge about literature from the late Qing onward. In the context of China’s transition to a Western-style educational system in the early twentieth century, reinforced by a turn of intellectuals from literary rev…
A Distant Shore
What relation does or should a descendant of immigrant parents have to the ancestral homeland? And what notions can he or she rely on to characterize, sustain, or even nullify such relations—language, ethnicity, consanguinity, or cultural loyalty? The Chinese Singaporean writer Chia Joo Ming ponders and casts new lights on these questions in his novella “Ambon Vacation.” For Chia, Chinese diasporic subjects have open-ended and plural identities t…
Hao Ran and the Cultural Revolution
This chapter offers a close reading of several works by Liang Jinguang, better known as Hao Ran, contextualizing his work within a tradition of Maoist “cultural revolution” that led up to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. Although Hao Ran’s works might appear to be replete with socialist ideology, this chapter argues that the socialist content in his works is actually complicated by the literary tropes and images he us…
Conclusion
As conclusion to the Handbook , this chapter reflects on the ways in which Chinese literary studies can and does inform the broader fields of literary studies and the humanities as such. In the past decades, Chinese literary studies has been experiencing a double perspectival shift: on one hand it has extended and expanded the scope of the field with ever more complex definitions of “Chineseness,” on the other, it has striven to integrate itself …
Malaysia as Method
Set during a 1987 police crackdown on protestors challenging the discriminatory policies of the Malaysian government, Malaysian Chinese author Xiao Hei’s “A Literary Record of October 27 and Other Things” (1989) uses postcolonial Malaysia’s thirtieth national anniversary to reflect upon institutionalized ethnolinguistic minoritization. Through intertextual citation, Xiao Hei’s novella not only constitutes a collaborative historical record of Ma H…
Lu Xun, Returning Home, and May Fourth Modernity
Leaving home was the quintessential modern act for Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century, as home had come to represent cultural backwardness and oppression by the early Republican period. At the same time as they wrote of leaving it, however, modern Chinese writers also often wrote of returning home. This chapter analyzes the complex relationships between the individual and his home in Lu Xun’s first-person reminiscences. As repre…
Chinese Literary Thought in Modern Times
Theory has both enriched contemporary Chinese literary studies and generated discontent. Rather than uncritically embracing or rejecting theory, this chapter probes the discourse of Chinese literary thought in Chinese modernity as an engagement with Chinese traditions as well as modern Western theoretical practice. Contrary to the perception that the May Fourth era was a period of total antitraditionalism, intellectuals at the time appear to have…
The Construction of the Modern Chinese Concept of (“drama”)
Roughly equivalent to the English word drama , the modern Chinese term xiju is of relatively recent provenance. This chapter traces the etymology of this modern usage of the term xiju , looking in particular at the introduction of Western concepts of drama and performance conventions into China during the early modern period. It looks at the relationship between the modern concept of xiju and a set of earlier Chinese terms that were used to refer…
Poet of the Late Summer Corn
This chapter introduces the poetry of Aku Wuwu (aka Luo Qingchun), a member of the Yi ethnic minority group in ethnically diverse southwest China. His experiences growing up in the Liangshan Mountains of southern Sichuan have deeply marked his work and shaped his academic career. The chapter explores his use of imagery of traditional and contemporary Yi culture and the natural and human-manipulated environment in his work. His stress on “mother t…
Singing “The Internationale”
This chapter examines the preoccupation of Chinese intellectuals, translators, writers, and performers with the power of voice and sound by analyzing the prominent role of “The Internationale” throughout the changing landscape of Chinese cultural performance. It traces how “The Internationale” evolved from its French and Soviet roots into a Chinese nationalist song and how it became a rally song to mobilize the Chinese masses, preserving its popu…
The Allegory of Time and Space
How did writers in Maoist China assume their role as authors, torn between self-expression and the political demands of the Party? How should we read the literary creations produced at a time in which literary works were not always candid expressions of the authors, but were manifestations of complex negotiations and self-censorship? This chapter provides a case study to illustrate these quandaries, focusing specifically on Tian Han’s historical …
Art (38 works) · History (38 works) · Literature (35 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (29 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Political science (22 works) · Aesthetics (21 works) · China (20 works) · Law (20 works)