Visual Subjectivity in Chinese and American Thought and Literature

Providing the reader with a systematic study of visual subjectivity in comparative thought and literature, this book analyses the role that vision and visuality, especially interpersonal visuality, plays in the constitution of subject and subjectivity in Chinese and American traditions.

Guozhong Duan received his PhD in literary studies from the University of Texas at Dallas and is currently an associate professor of international studies in Yangzhou University, China. He has published numerous Chinese and English articles in journals and volumes including Journal of Qinghua University, Journal of Zhejiang University, Journal of Dr. Sun Yat-sen University, and Social Sciences Abroad, and Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature. Ming Dong Gu is the Katherine R. Cecil Professor in the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has authored five English monographs and edited three English volumes. His recent publications include The Nature and Rationale of Zen/Chan and Enlightenment (2024); Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, and Aesthetics (2021); and Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature (2019). In addition, he has published more than 180 articles in English and Chinese journals.

Introduction: Visual Subjectivity in Chinese and American Traditions 1. Self and Visuality in Chinese Thought 2. Theories of Visual Subjectivity in Western Thought 3. Intellectual Context for Visual Representation of Subjectivity in Chinese and American Fiction 4. Visual Politics and Narcissistic Imagining: The Sin of Seeing in the Plum in the Golden Vase 5. Hall of Mirrors and Self Identity: Tragic Vision in the Story of the Stone 6. Visual Trap: Transcendentalist Vision and Subjectivity in Moby Dick 7. Dualistic Vision and Disciplinary Gaze: Ethics of Visuality in Hawthorne's Fiction Conclusion: A Transcultural View of Visual Subjectivity