Chine familière

Zhang Yongle, dans la dernière livraison de la NLR (49, Jan-Feb 2008, pp. 5-27), refait une histoire du travail intellectuel et culturel de Dushu [book reading], la revue chinoise fondée à la fin des années 1970. "No Forbidden Zone in Reading? Dushu and the Chinese Intelligentsia". Un coup d'oeil étonnant sur la mondialité des situations.

. réforme des universités : "Included here is Dushu's important intervention in the controversies around the market-driven reform proposals for Beijing University. A 2003 plan, drafter by an economist, aimed to introduce the principle of competition, encouraging departments to hire overseas rather than domestic scholars, and quantifying the evaluation system to replicate American academic norms. It was vehemently criticized by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Dushu's symposium on the proposals raised the discussion to a new level. It brought together leading scholars from Beijing and elsewhere to argue the case for the university as an institution for the pursuit of intellectual freedom and innovation, and to question the bias of the economists behind the proposal." (19)

. autre mouvement de terrain : de la littérature aux sciences sociales, comme repère de la culture. Avec l'intervention de la French Theory en pivot, d'ailleurs. La revue passant d'une atmosphère de lettrés, style et élégance, culture de chinois classique, à celle, plus mordante, d'une culture post-Révolution culturelle : capable de critique, informée des théorèmes occidentaux, mais aussi coupée de son héritage littéraire et culturel par la rupture communiste. "this change of style needs to be understood with reference to the disciplinary differenciation that has taken place in China over the past decade. In tehe 1980s, intellectuals read all kinds of books without much consciousness of disciplinary boundaries; by the 1990s, the altter could no longer be ignored. Compared to literature, the new social sciences appeared to have a much higher knowledge threshold: the language of economics can be forbidding to a lay reader and there were many newly translated terms. Consequently, it has been hard to maintain the same level of literary elegance. In the recent debate, critics of Wand and Huang have interpreted this stylistic difference as symptomatic of the two editors' break from Dushu's classical prose tradition. In fact, complaints about readability was first made in the mid-80s, when Dushu began to introduce Western theories.
Question de "bad writing" associée aux Etats-Unis avec la Theory, fuel for the Culture wars, et l'un des signes supplémentaires du Closing of the American Mind. Barthes avait posé dès 1966, Critique et vérité, l'insupportable, pour un "vraisemblable critique" encore centré sur les Lettres, du langage sur le langage. Les circulations transculturelles de ces problèmes en multiplient les effets merveilleusement.