The Promise and Premise of Creativity Why Comparative Literature Matters

The Promise and Premise of Creativity considers literature in the larger context of globalization and "the clash of cultures." Refuting the view that the study of literature is "useless," Eoyang argues that it expands three distinct intellectual skills: creative imagination, vicarious sympathy, and capacious intuition. With the advent of the personal computer and the blurring of cultural and economic boundaries, it is the ability to imagine, to intuit, and to invent that will mark the educated student, and allow her to survive the rapid pace of change. As never before, the ability to empathize with other peoples, to understand cultures very different from one's own, is vital to success in a globalized world. In this, the very "uselessness" of literature may inure the mind to think creatively.Engaging with both the theory and practice of literature, its past and its potential future, Eoyang claims that our sense of the world at large, of the salient similarities and differences between cultures, would be critically diminished without comparative literature.

ForewordPreliminaries1. Why Study Literature? 2. What's the Story?The Relevance of Literature to Life3. The Uses of the Useless: Comparative Literature and the Multinational CorporationApproaches4. Macintosh Apples and Mandarin Oranges: Comparing East and West.5. Cuentos Chinos ("Chinese Tales"): The Exotic Imaginary6. Francophone Cathay: Gallicizing China7. The Persistence of Cathay: China in World Literature8. The Emergence of the Southern Hemisphere in Literature: Neglected Domains9. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Modern and the Postmodern: Ethnocentricities10. Cultural Logics: Contradiction vs. Maodun11. Dialectical Maodun in the Works of Octavio Paz: The Mestizo Mind12. Meaningful and Meaningless Comparison: The Heuristic and the Invidious?Prospects13. The Globalization of Knowledge: Comparative Literature as Interdisciplinary and Multilingual Discourse14. The Glocalization of Knowledge: The Ends of the World or the Edge of Heaven15. The Undisciplined Discipline: Comparative Literature and Creative Wandering16.? Synergies and Synaesthesia: An Intraworldly Comparative LiteratureBibliographyIndex