Persistent Forms

Chance Encounters: World Literature Between the Unexpected and the Probable

“…The reservoir's depths are too readily distilled into caricatures of its epistemological extremes, and indeed, as Eric Hayot writes, must be so distilled in order to preserve the conditions for the "restricted, self-enclosed existence" that may give "humanist ethos and scientific desire their deepest meaning" but which is also a kind of imprisonment. 31 At one extreme is the idea of probability as a totalizing and deterministic concept that sees every event as predictable with enough statistical data; and on the other a radical skepticism that sees uncertainty everywhere and is in fact a romantic (and later post-structural) backlash to the first position. But the waters of this reservoir, as Maurice Lee writes, are actually far murkier: "Even nineteenth-century probability experts vacillated between competing models of chance: objective views (actual probabilities in nature) versus subjective ones (expectations under conditions of partial knowledge); descriptions of past events versus predictions of future ones; degrees of belief regarding single outcomes versus the mass logic of frequentism (an approach that eventually came to dominate the field but emerged unevenly over the century)."…”

Productive distortions: On the translated imaginaries and misplaced identities of the late Qing utopian novel

“…These vacillations of identity, as Hayot remarks, are cleverly conveyed by Looking Further Backward's author via the constant alternation between two competing modes of narration, through which the "consistent reversals of the standard features of the Asiatic stereotypes" prevents the narration to reach a definitive closure and reasserts its quality of ideological undecidability. 41 The (tentative) closure of the novel's narrative trajectory is not in fact left to Julian West's voice, but to that of Won Lung Li, whose last lecture to the "American Barbarians" reveals to the reader that the Chinese invasion is complete and its consequences irreversible. The Chinese province of North America has been completely colonised, and millions of Americans are being deported to their new mainland in continental China: "If the United States was to be held by China, then the people of the United States must be willing subjects of China".…”