Conditions of Comparison

Reviews / Votes

Conditions of Comparison offers a meticulous genealogy and timely recapitulation of key critical concepts, reading protocols, and analytical instruments that constitute the discipline of comparative literature and culture. Ming Xie ably demonstrates the potential of this disciplinary formation for what he terms comparative intercultural inquiry as interpretive practice and ethical intervention among diverse cultures, their historical imbrications, and contrapuntal engagements. An exemplary study that illustrates the self-reflexive practices whose history it eloquently narrates. -- Djelal Kadir, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature, Penn State University, USA and author of Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (2010) This is a book we've been awaiting for a long time. Moving beyond established critiques of conventional models of comparative study, Ming Xie provides a rigorous analysis of the conceptual foundations and methodological challenges of intercultural inquiry. His dissections of the critical categories underpinning current work on translation, world literature, post-colonial theory, and East/West studies-categories such as universalism, pluralism, orientalism, essentialism, incommensurability, and difference-are virtuoso performances: richly nuanced, philosophically grounded, and tremendously productive. Compelling both in its elaboration of the stakes and epistemological conditions of comparative practice and in its gestures towards a new meta-critical framework for global studies marked by flexibility, contingency, and reflexivity, this book will prove an essential touchstone for the theory and practice of comparative scholarship in the humanities. -- David Porter, Professor and Associate Chair of English, University of Michigan, USA, and author of The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (2010) "Comparison is ubiquitous and universal, Ming Xie forcefully argues, and merits investigation for its epistemological underpinnings beyond the political and the pragmatic. Conditions of Comparison is an invaluable study of comparativity, focusing particularly on intercultural encounters. Incommensurability and misrecognition are components of what he calls 'critical comparativity,' a perceptual process that he promotes as a necessity for the intensified global interconnections of the 21st century. Drawing on thinkers from across the humanities, Ming Xie makes a strong case for epistemologically informed comparative practices." -- Susan Stanford Friedman, Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities and Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and author of Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton University Press, 1998)