Jing Tsu
Autore di Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
Sull'Autore
Jing Tsu, Ph.D. (Harvard University), is associate professor of Chinese Literature at Yale University. She is author of Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937 (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Harvard mostra altro University Press, 2010). David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. He is author, editor, and coeditor of numerous publications in English and Chinese, including The Monster That is History: Violence, History, and Fictional Writing in 20th Century China (University of California Press, 2004) and Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke University Press, 2007). mostra meno
Opere di Jing Tsu
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1973-02-23
- Sesso
- female
- Nazione (per mappa)
- USA
- Luogo di nascita
- Taiwan
- Istruzione
- Harvard University
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Wanted List (1)
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Statistiche
- Opere
- 5
- Utenti
- 214
- Popolarità
- #104,033
- Voto
- 3.7
- Recensioni
- 11
- ISBN
- 19
- Lingue
- 1
The best parts of this book for me were the ones that dealt with the features of Chinese culture, language, and writing that set it apart from the other languages participating in the technological revolution of the last 200 years. As I was reading it, I couldn't help but share little tidbits of information learned with friends and coworkers about how arduous modernizing the Chinese language was. As an Anglo, and a member of Latin-script using Western Culture, it's difficult to understand how alienating it must have been for Chinese speakers to discover that the whole world was being built on technology that had no adequate way to incorporate your language. The sheer mindfuck of designing a hanzi typewriter, or making telegraphy work with Chinese characters never occurred to me before reading this book. As much as globalization has done to damage our societies and planet, the ability of human beings to find ways to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries that a first glace seem untraversable is something to marvel at (perhaps cower before). I don't think the average person really appreciates how amazing it is for someone to, with a single keystroke, switch between English and 中文, or to summon up a single character among tens of thousands in the blink of an eye. It's only after comparing a convenience that has become mundane to how people used to do it (usually mind-numbingly tedious) that we can truly appreciate how far, and how quickly we've come.
We've had to scale innumerable logistical Mt. Everests to make our modern world possible, and this book was worth reading merely to appreciate that fact as it relates to Chinese. Where it lost me sometimes was the long-winded biographical dives that devoted lots of white space to people and stories that were not as interesting as the technology they begat. Jing Tsu seems to be following the modern journalistic/non-fiction convention that we always need a "character" to latch onto, to ground the information being shared in a lifetime's experience. This being the prevailing style, I can't blame her for doing just that in a book geared for popular readership, but there were several times where my mind sort of shut off as she was describing the twists and turns of a particular idea or technology as it wound its way through the lives of various people, governmental agencies, or computer labs. I honestly couldn't tell you the name of any of the many inventors, linguists, and computer scientists that she talks about in this book. What does stick out is the advances they fomented. Jing Tsu seems to be trying to reclaim these folks from obscurity, and show how they contributed to bringing Chinese into the modern era. However, it is perhaps only natural that the particulars of these people's lives are lost to history even as their developments loom large. Despite popular conception, history is mostly made by tiny changes accumulated over the span of years and countless overlapping lifetimes. That these lifetimes when viewed in the abstract may not hold our interest is not a slight on those who lived them - it's the work that serves as their legacy.… (altro)