Rather than areas, periods, and theoretical schools, I define my interests in terms of problems. My projects usually start from a declared conflict between large-scale intellectual structures and try to dissolve it by discovering areas of complicity in which that conflict does not hold. For example, the distinction between oral and written traditions turns out to repose on an undeclared concept of technology common to both; the supposed ontological difference between Chinese and Western modes of thought cannot be phrased except in terms that undermine that difference; and so on. Engaging with alien discourses (historically, linguistically, or contextually different from the norms represented by, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, the MLA International Bibliography or the DSM-V) is for me the purpose of research.
Monolingualism and the narrowness of mind it tends to foster have always been my antagonists. Undergraduate work in Greek showed me how strange the ancients could be, if one took philology from a less traditional angle. I learned Chinese in Paris in order to carry out a comparative project that was quickly abandoned. This new language, and especially its classical form, constantly reminded me of how much I still had to learn. Thinking of rhetorical categories as a guide to semantic change led me to join the concentration of people for whom “rhetorical reading” was a synonym of deconstruction. I was lucky to have wonderful teachers (among them Kang-i Sun Chang, François Cheng, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Rulon Wells, Yu Ying-shih), mighty intellectual companions (Mel Chin, Paul Farmer) and to have had the freedom to shift focus several times (all the areas I probed, even inconclusively, as a graduate student have ended up feeding my later research).
Some of the work I did has been recognized with prizes: The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Wellek Prize 1993), The Ethnography of Rhythm (Scaglione Prize 2017) Translation as Citation (Wellek Prize 2018). I have also had fellowships, visiting professorships, and other encouragements.
My main current project is more a work of editorship than authorship. I am organizing, for the International Comparative Literature Association, a multi-volume history of the literatures of East Asia from the invention of writing to the modern era. It will show what a “world literature” can be outside the European framework of values and models.