這一年多來，有關318公民運動的書籍，一本接著一本，讓人目不暇給。「革命的做法」是其中很特別的一本。作者「港千尋」是日本知名攝影家、學者、評論家。曾經親身參與許多世界各地的公民運動，評論其中群眾與移動的意涵。讀者不一定會同意他的觀點，但是會得到不同的啟發。他提出關懷倫理（ethics of care）的概念，說明規模這麼大的318運動，仍能堅持非暴力抗爭，以減少傷亡，是很不容易的事情，在世界各地僅見。他講身體、講藝術、講空間（議會配置圖、交通標誌、緊急通道等）。他對瓦楞紙的觀察也很有趣。瓦楞紙是臺灣包裝瓶裝水、水果最主要的材料。運動者使用瓦楞紙製作立法院周遭的立體模型；瓦楞紙鋪在馬路上就成了睡覺/休息的床墊；將對折的瓦楞紙鋪在纏著鐵絲尖刺的拒馬上，又讓防禦用的拒馬成了簡易的沙發（和法國藝術家Philippe Million所設計的barrier bench有異曲同工之妙）。
www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId...Basic - 頁庫存檔16 Sep 2010 – The Derrida Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction and one of the ...
The Derrida Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction and one of the most important and influential European thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Derrida's thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Derrida's writings and detailed synopses of his key works.
The Dictionary also includes entries on Derrida's major philosophical influences and those he engaged with, such as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan and Levinas. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Derrida's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Derrida Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Derrida, deconstruction or modern European philosophy more generally.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chronology of Derrida's Life and Works A-Z Dictionary
Simon Morgan Wortham is Professor of English and co-director of the London Graduate School at Kingston University London, UK.
Reviews
“Simon Morgan Wortham’s Derrida Dictionary is a spectacular intellectual accomplishment. He has amazing mastery of all Derrida’s multitudinous writings (about seventy books, an immense number of articles and interviews). Perhaps the highest praise I can make of this extraordinary and extraordinarily valuable book is that each entry, rather than closing the door on a given Derridean topic, makes you want to go back and read or reread for yourself Archive Fever or Paper Machine or Without Alibi, and all the rest of those seventy books.” – J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, USA, author of For Derrida (Fordham, 2009)
“This is no ordinary dictionary. Simon Morgan Wortham provides not only comprehensive, rigorously defined, and well-contextualised terms that cross-reference other terms and books across the corpus of Derrida's work, but in the process offers a lucid exposition of Derrida’s work itself.” – Nicole Anderson, Co-Editor/Founder Derrida Today journal, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
“Simon Morgan Wortham’s dictionary is much more than a dictionary; it is, above all, a remarkable collection of short essays on Derrida’s major works and concepts that will serve as valuable introductions to newcomers and useful reminders to those already familiar with Derrida’s writings. Doing full justice to all periods and areas of Derrida’s work, it succeeds in showing both his extraordinary range and the connections and continuities that link his various ventures in thought.” – Derek Attridge, University of York, UK
'Simon Morgan Wortham’s Dictionary is an indispensable tool for anyone entering or continuing to work in theory. For those of us who have been doing so for some time, the Dictionary serves as a reminder of how timely Derrida’s work was and is: a Derrida Dictionary for today and very much for tomorrow.' -- Derrida Today
Quel difference! Jacques Derrida's library has landed at Princeton
The personal library of Jacques Derrida, the father of Deconstructionism, has abandoned France for New Jersey.
Princeton has acquired the library, consisting of 13,800 books and other materials. The university took delivery of the materials on March 19.
Derrida, who died in 2004, was a literary critic and philosopher who moved to France from Algeria in 1949. He wrote in French, and he's commonly thought of as a French theorist.
Nevertheless, his library is now in New Jersey. Many of the volumes are full of notes in Derrida's hand. He once explained that his books bear "traces of the violence of pencil strokes, exclamation points, arrows and underlining."
Princeton professor Hal Foster, co-director of the university's Program in Media and Modernity, said in a release, "Derrida developed his own thought through a meticulous engagement with other thinkers, past and present, thinkers who at once constitute the Western traditions of philosophy and literature and defy them (indeed they constitute them in part because they defied them). What a boon it is for us at Princeton to have his notes on these thinkers and writers, to see the master of textuality perform, as it were, on other master texts."
As the Derrida materials are processed, they will be added to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton's Firestone Library, where they will be available to scholars.
德里達在羅蘭·巴特《論拉辛》上的筆記。 這批資料是今年3月19日從巴黎運抵普林斯頓，之前普林斯頓曾派出專家組對這些資料進行清理。目前，這批資料保存在普林斯頓燧石圖書館的“珍本圖書與特別收藏部門”（Department of Rare Books and Special Collections），除了這批珍貴的德里達的私人藏書，這裡還收集了大量的私人藏書及手稿，包括2014年接收的諾貝爾文學獎得主托尼·莫里森、1995年接收的西班牙語世界最出名的散文家及小說家之一卡洛斯·富恩特斯（Carlos Fuentes）的私人藏書及手稿，等等。
T. H. Tsien, a scholar of Chinese books and printing who in 1941 risked his life to smuggle ...
Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien 錢存訓
Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien 錢存訓, Professor Emeritus in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Curator Emeritus of the East Asian Library of the University of Chicago, was born in 1910 in Taixian 泰縣, Jiangsu, China, as he says in the first line of his memoir, “during the reign of the last Emperor of the Imperial Dynasty.” Over the course of his extraordinarily eventful life, he has made numerous contributions to the study and preservation of China’s literary heritage. After graduating from Jinling University in Nanjing in 1932, he worked first as assistant librarian of Jiaotong University Library in Shanghai and then as director of the newly opened Engineering Reference Library at Nanjing, a branch of the Beiping Library. In 1941, during China’s War Against Japan, he risked his life to ship 30,000 volumes of rare books to the United States for safe-keeping. In 1947, he moved to the United States, beginning a career at the University of Chicago that would span eight decades: as a student (he received his Ph.D. from the University in 1957), professor (he was promoted to professor in 1964), and librarian (he was appointed librarian in 1947, and held the post until his retirement in 1978). The author of several monographs and more than 150 scholarly articles, Professor Tsien’s Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginning of Chinese Books and Inscriptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1st edition, 1962; 2nd revised edition, 2004) and the Paper and Printing volume (Volume 5.1) for Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) are regarded as classics of Sinological scholarship and have been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The teacher of two generations of Chinese librarians in America, Professor Tsien resides in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
最近一個甲子，對於在美國從事中國研究的學生、學者而言，「錢存訓」的大名跟 「中國文化」、「圖書版本」幾乎是一個同義詞。一九九一年台北和北京出版了《中國圖書文史論集——錢存訓先生八十榮慶紀念》，二○○六年北京圖書館及台灣 的圖書館學會又分別推出《南山論學集——錢存訓先生九五生日紀念》與《中國圖書館學會會報．錢存訓教授九秩晉五祝壽專號》祝賀他的華誕。錢先生的生平事 跡，他的門生與朋友寫了很多。關於他的家世，卻只提及曾祖父乃道光朝進士，祖父精於書畫，父親曾是佛學雜誌《海潮音》主編。我認識錢先生四十多年了，亦僅 耳聞他是屬於「書香世家」的一族，直到讀了《留美雜憶——六十年來美國生活的回顧》（台北傳記文學出版社，二○○七年；合肥黃山書社，二○○八年），才發 現他首次自述﹕「我的家庭是社會上一般人所稱頌的『書香世家』，美國人所羨慕的『帝王後裔』。所謂『帝王後裔』，緣自錢氏宗譜中的始祖是五代吳越國王錢鏐 （八五二—九三四）。據說他文武雙全，奠定了『上有天堂、下有蘇杭』的富庶地區。到了雷峰塔刻經的第五代錢俶歸附趙宋，錢氏統治了這一地區將近一百 年。」（頁三，傳記文學版，餘同） 上面這段話，我有兩點感想。其一，錢先生溫、良、恭、儉、讓的涵養，是大家所熟知的。到了將近一百歲的時候，才寫出自己比較詳盡的「家庭背景」，透露出 「帝王後裔」的信息。這不但意味著他對史實存真的態度，而且也給我們這些後輩一點驚喜。其次，他說明「帝王後裔」是「美國人所羨慕」的。近世以還，國人對 專制皇朝的「帝王」印象欠佳。美國有些人出於名人崇拜的心態，卻很羨慕英國的皇族。因此，他便引用「美國人」的口氣來磘述，可見其用心良苦矣！ 捨「旅美」而取「留美」 這本書的標題，捨「旅美」而取「留美」，也許有特別的寓意。錢先生本來並不打算長期「旅居」異域，無奈迫於現實，只能久「留」不歸。而且，他認為自己是 一個「留學生」而不是「僑民」。事實上，他在美國的心路歷程，諸如讀書、工作、教學、研究、寫作、出版與每個階段的閱歷與磨煉，正是絕大多數跟他同時代的 中國留美學者的真實寫照。由於他的學術貢獻和文化活動是多面性的，這部個人紀錄，也可說是近代中美兩國文化、學術、教育的歷史縮影。 《留美雜憶》的內容，既不「雜」也不亂，乃有條不紊而且全面涵蓋了錢先生的典 型文人生涯的生動紀錄。全書的正文六章包括﹕《國內經歷》、《定居芝城》、《工讀十年》、《坐擁書城》、《教研一得》、《退而未休》。另有六章附錄：《家 世淵源》、《先德遺墨》、《作者生平》、《著述評論》、《師友懷念》、《福杯滿溢》。正文是一氣呵成的「編年體」自傳。錢先生說自己原沒有寫回憶錄的念 頭。因為訪問的人很多，為了避免重複回答，才改變初衷，從頭寫起。再者，此書副題說是居住美國的回顧，但《國內經歷》那一章，卻甚重要。錢先生回憶：「早 年熱心革命，為軍閥逮捕，但大難不死，卻因此得以接受高等教育……。」 （頁二）許倬雲先生在序言中所說的「溫良正直」，便是從少年時期培養出來的品格，以至一生中有立德、立功、立言的成就。附錄各章，乃是資料的匯集。錢先生 的學術交遊，在《師友懷念》一章可見一斑。至於《福杯滿溢》的文字，是錢師母的作品。讀後教人相信美滿的家庭與成功的人生是相輔相成的。 成名作《書於竹帛》 作為一名讀者，我很佩服錢先生蒐集文獻與圖片等資料的功力。而他著述考慮周全，舉凡一言一事、一人一物，都擺布得四平八穩，交代得一清二楚。結論在平實 中有創見，在創見中又極具啟發與說服力。舉例來說，他的成名作《書於竹帛：中國古代的文字記錄》（Written on Bamboo and Silk），牽涉的範圍極廣，諸如古文字學，文字載體如甲骨、金石、簡牘、帛書、紙卷，以及書寫工具如筆、墨、硯、刀等各種文物，都是素材。我們試想，一 門甲骨或青銅器，就足夠讓一組專家做長期研究了，錢先生卻憑一己之力，在半工半讀的情形下，抱著「竭澤而漁」的態度，把這些材料不厭其煩地進行了「地毯 式」的清查。當我們讀了經過「爬梳統整、董理序次」的資料性章節之後，分析性的「結論」便水到渠成，一切問題都能迎刃而解了。怪不得這篇博士學位論文一經 出版，立刻被譽為「經典之作」，於是，李約瑟（Joseph Needham）所編《中國科學技術史》（Science and Civilisation in China）大系中的《紙和印刷》（Paper and Printing）一冊，執筆者則非錢先生莫屬。 * 錢存訓《中國古代書史》香港：中文大學，1975 (本書根據周寧森翻譯《書於竹帛》增訂而成) 竹帛編製的典冊，是紙張印刷圖書之濫觴。那麼，《紙和印刷》就是《書於竹 帛》的續篇了。錢先生曾說，李氏請他合作這個寫作計劃，正是「不謀而合」（頁六九）。我認為，他們合作獲得的成果「相得益彰」，而且可說是國際文壇上的一 段佳話。李氏雖是知名的生化學者，「他不是科班出身的漢學家；而且思想左傾，受到一些英國學者的攻擊。」（頁二五四）更嚴重的是，「李氏在朝鮮戰爭期間， 曾參與世界和平理事會……指控美國曾經使用細菌，引起美國官方對這一指控感到憤怒……從此他便一直為美國政府列入不受歡迎人士的黑名單。」（頁二五九）一 九七六年李氏赴美接受芝加哥大學所贈榮譽博士學位一事， 全是錢先生幕後的策劃與接洽。可見錢先生對「文字結緣」友人的誠懇與熱情， 而李氏於闊別三十年後重遊 「花旗土地」，也「認為在他晚年的多次旅行中最高興而具有象徵性的一次訪問」（頁二五九）。
《紙和印刷》專題權威著述 《紙和印刷》是英美學術出版界一個非常成功的例子。它原定篇幅限於一百頁，最後李氏同意擴充為三十萬言約五百頁的巨著。初版在發行前就被預訂一空，結果 續印三次， 是《中國科學技術史》 大系中銷路最好的一冊 。學術界早已公認這本著作是專業的百科全書， 也是專題的權威著述。中國人雖然最先發明了印刷術，可是，有系統的印刷史研究則有待於一九二五年卡特（T. F. Carter）那部《中國印刷術的發明和它的西傳》（Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward）名著的出現。一九八五年《紙和印刷》的出版，可說是卡特之後，錢先生將六十年來的考古與研究的成果，做了一次總結。另一方面，他對國內 日漸蓬勃的學術風氣，尤其是對這個專題的研究，以及中國文化對世界文明的貢獻，也有一定程度的影響。
"The boy next to me fell to the floor and for a moment I didn’t know if he had fainted or was dead – then I saw that he was covering his eyes so he didn’t have to see the waves any more. A pregnant woman vomited and started screaming. Below deck, people were shouting that they couldn’t breathe, so the men in charge of the boat went down and started beating them. By the time we saw a rescue helicopter, two days after our boat had left Libya with 250 passengers on board, some people were already dead – flung into the sea by the waves, or suffocated downstairs in the dark. It’s very difficult for me to think about this, nearly four years after I paid a smuggler to get me out of Libya, but it’s important for people to understand what is happening to us and why."
JSTOR: Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo: Figure and Temporality in an ... Instead they examine the "pesche forestiere," and Tancredi voices his approbation of his uncle in this alternate role of "agricola pius. ...庄稼人
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) inherited a palace in Palermo (he was an aristocrat — a prince, no less), and had it not been demolished by an Allied bomb on April 5, 1943, the Palazzo Lampedusa would probably be scrubbed clean today, assiduously restored in honor of an author whose only novel, published posthumously in 1958, is one of Italy’s best-loved books. “The Leopard” is about the decline of a noble Sicilian family. The patriarch, proud Fabrizio, Prince of Salina (based on Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, Prince Giulio), is acutely aware of this decline and seems almost to embrace it. Set in Palermo and deep in the interior in the early 1860s, during the tumultuous years of Garibaldi’s Risorgimento when Sicily was annexed to a united Italy, the novel could fuel a seminar’s worth of meditations on political and social transformation. (The famous line, which becomes a mantra of sorts for Don Fabrizio, is this: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”) But though it has sparked heated debates about Sicilian history, most readers respond to the book’s shimmering beauty, and to the towering figure of the Prince himself. Wise and perplexed, stern and indulgent, loyal and essentially solitary, even in the midst of his crowded household, Don Fabrizio is the indispensable companion for traveling around Sicily. He’s one of those unforgettable literary characters who seem more real than people you’ve actually met (and easily more important than the neighbor who moved away or the great-aunt you last laid eyes on a dozen years ago). The trait that defines the Prince is his dignity, which stems in part from his clear-eyed sense of himself; he claims to be “without illusions” — he lacks, he says, “the faculty of self-deception.” He surveys himself, and Sicily, with unflinching honesty. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.From The Sea, the Sea: The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold. – Iris Murdoch (Penguin; $15.00)
Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms Dirge, a song of lamentation in mourning for someone's death; or a poem in the form of such a song, and usually less elaborate than anelegy. An ancient genre employed by Pindar in Greek and notably by Propertius in Latin. The dirge also occurs in English, most famously in the ariel's song 'Full fathom five thy father lies' in shakespear's The Tempest.
我抄這段，才恍然大悟梁兄翻譯的<<大海，大海>>之作者的先生John Bayley所寫的《輓歌》（Elegy for Iris，有天下文化出版社翻譯本），實在有典故，都沒被翻譯和導讀人點破，因為Iris酷愛莎士比亞的Tempest。 *** 我抄的沒錯。英國文學中當然有許多人寫dirges，莎士比亞作品中的，只不過是較為出名。據M. H.Abram的The Glossary of Literature Terms，挽歌（dirge）不同於哀歌（elegy—hc:我們或聽過Thomas Gray 於1751年寫的Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard，The New Penguin Book of English Verse，p.484；美國總統甘迺迪遇刺後，名詩人Auden寫Elegy，由斯特拉文斯基譜曲）的地方，是挽歌較短、較不茍形式、並且，通常挽歌可配曲唱。除了前引的莎士比亞之「海下長眠」，還可舉William Collins的 A Somg From Shakespeare's Cymbeline.
February 9, 1999
OBITUARY
Iris Murdoch, Novelist and Philosopher, Is Dead
By RICHARD NICHOLLS
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. The Associated Press
Dame Iris Murdoch in London, 1998.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.ris Murdoch, a prodigiously inventive and idiosyncratic British writer whose 26 novels offered lively plots, complex characters and intellectual speculation, died yesterday at a nursing home in Oxford, England. She was 79 and had Alzheimer's disease. Her struggle with Alzheimer's was documented recently in ''Elegy for Iris,'' a memoir by her husband, the critic and novelist John Bayley, who was at her bedside when she died. Miss Murdoch's first novel was published in 1954 and in a career that lasted for more than four decades, her fiction received many honors, including the Booker Prize for ''The Sea, the Sea,'' the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for ''The Sacred and Profane Love Machine'' and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ''The Black Prince.'' Although she was made a Dame of the British Empire, she rarely garnered the attention given to gaudier contemporaries. She spent much of her career quietly teaching and writing, away from lecture tours, prize committees and television appearances. Along with novels, she produced a half a dozen works on philosophy, several plays, critical writing on literature and modern ideas and poetry. Miss Murdoch had a background in philosophy -- she knew and wrote about Jean-Paul Sartre, studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein and was a lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University -- and her fiction grappled with such questions as the nature of good and evil. This led many who knew her work superficially to assume that her novels were philosophical explorations of the origins of morality and behavior and too esoteric or intellectually rigorous for a general audience. In fact, many of Miss Murdoch's novels are exuberantly melodramatic, offering bemused records of romantic or erotic follies, as well as more somber battles between individuals representing moral good and its opposite. Her characters, drawn largely from the middle class, are described with loving exactitude and in such depth that their struggles to define what it means to live a good life take on dramatic force. In Books, Happiness And Moral Lessons Far from viewing fiction as another and lesser way of dealing with philosophical questions, Miss Murdoch argued that literature was meant ''to be grasped by enjoyment,'' and that the art of the tale was ''a fundamental form of thought'' in its own right. The ideal reader, she told one interviewer, was ''someone who likes a jolly good yarn and enjoys thinking about the book as well, about the moral issues.'' In another interview she went further, asserting that good art offers ''uncontaminated'' happiness that also teaches ''how to look at the world and to understand it; it makes everything far more interesting.'' Her belief in literature had its inception in her happy and book-filled childhood. Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919, the only child of British and Irish parents. When she was a year old her family moved to London, where her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, joined the civil service. In interviews she remembered that as a child she had existed ''in a perfect trinity of love.'' Her mother, the former Irene Alice Richardson, who had trained as an opera singer, was a ''beautiful, lively, witty woman with a happy temperament.'' Her father began discussing books with her early on and encouraged her to read widely. She progressed rapidly from Lewis Carroll (one of her favorites) and Robert Louis Stevenson to more adult fare. Her great pleasure in reading, and her early attempts to write stories led to the conviction, which she formed as a child, that she would become a writer. She attended boarding school in Bristol, and in 1938 entered Somerville College, a women's college at Oxford, where she studied the classics, ancient history and philosophy. She graduated with honors in 1942 and immediately took a job with the Treasury. In 1944 she began working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which helped Europeans displaced by World War II. The somber experiences of the war had a profound impact on her thinking. Close friends died while in service, and her work, often on the front lines, with poor and elderly refugees was hard but instructive. If her childhood had been mostly idyllic, there was, she later noted, at least one shadow falling across her memories of those years: her family members were largely ''wanderers,'' cut off from their Irish relations and their roots. Working with refugees led her to reflect further on the place of the exile in modern society, as well as on the sources of evil, raising questions that she would pursue in many novels. After leaving the United Nations, Miss Murdoch took up further study in philosophy at Cambridge University, where she worked with Wittgenstein. While she expressed no lasting allegiance to his school of thought, she said her studies with him spurred her development as a writer. In 1948 she became a fellow and tutor at St. Anne's College at Oxford, where she remained for 15 years as a lecturer in philosophy. It was a particularly heady time for anyone concerned with the study and application of philosophical thought; new schools of philosophy were contending for primacy and often combative works were being produced to define these emerging disciplines. Miss Murdoch had met Sartre, the most visible proponent of existentialism, while working with refugees in Belgium. Existentialism, with its focus on individual will, appealed to her, but she found its emphasis on the primacy of the self disturbing. Her first published work, ''Sartre: Romantic Rationalist'' (1953), was a serious, clear explanation of existentialism and its place in contemporary thought. While it was balanced, it was not uncritical: Miss Murdoch felt that existentialism encouraged an almost hermetic focus on the self, ignoring the corrosive implications of such a perspective on society. Her study paid special attention to Sartre's fiction. She had already written and discarded several novels, but now she had become absorbed with how fiction expressed ideas and the ways fiction and ideas could best be blended. ''Under the Net,'' her first published novel, appeared to generally positive reviews. It focused on the picaresque adventures of a free-spirited Irishman making the rounds of some of the more raffish areas of London and Paris. A reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement said the work seemed to announce the emergence of ''a brilliant talent.'' The novel signaled the beginning of an industrious and prolific career. Miss Murdoch published, on average, a novel every two years for the next four decades. Her work, while varied in setting and tone, rarely moved far from several central preoccupations and themes. She first encountered existentialist writings while working with refugees, and she drew deeply from her fascination with those experiences in her second novel, ''Flight From the Enchanter'' (1956). It concerns the well-intentioned, conventionally liberal Rose Keep, who attempts to offer solace to two Polish brothers, refugees from the war. Her efforts founder because she cannot see the brothers as something more than symbols of displaced, wounded humanity. Revisiting Themes Of Pure Love The double-edged nature of love figures often in Miss Murdoch's fiction. True love, she asserted in the essay ''The Sublime and the Good,'' was perhaps the best way to overcome isolation and the absorption with one's crippled and constricted self. ''Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real,'' she argued. Many of the figures in her fourth novel, ''The Bell'' (1958), are crippled by their inability to clearly see, and thus to truly love, those around them. ''The Bell'' reached a new level of sophistication for Miss Murdoch, displaying elements that would become hallmarks of her fiction: effortless shifting between the grim and the humorous; deft marshaling of a large, varied cast of characters and numerous subplots, and creation of fables or myths that could suggest the struggle between true and diminished forms of love. In many of Miss Murdoch's novels, romantic disasters, suicides and even murder are set in motion by a character who is brilliant and ferociously self-absorbed. Such figures, usually men, often go beyond egotism into evil. In ''A Fairly Honorable Defeat'' (1970), a biologist who helps create biological weapons sets out to destroy those around him. But goodness, Miss Murdoch suggests, while imperiled, is also resilient. In ''The Sacred and Profane Love Machine'' (1974), the only character who comes close to true altruism is destroyed. But the novel suggests that her death may have opened the hearts of those around her to a better, more responsible life. ''The Sea, the Sea'' (1978), which received the Booker Prize, is considered one of Miss Murdoch's best novels. Its protagonist, a retired theatrical director trying to win back his first love, is not so much evil as simply self-absorbed and dangerously certain of his limited view of the world. ''A Severed Head'' (1961) was a black farce about infidelity, incest and violence. Storytelling And Large Truths Miss Murdoch was always balancing the demands of storytelling with the more urgent need to examine how the truth of a fleeting life reflected the larger, permanent truths of existence. ''The Red and the Green'' charts the fates of two friends who find themselves on opposite sides during Ireland's 1916 Easter rebellion against British rule. ''The Nice and the Good'' follows the efforts of a decent man to uncover the reasons for a colleague's suicide and extricate himself from the seamy web of blackmail and the occult that he uncovers. ''Italian Girl'' traces the struggle of a young man to liberate himself from the corrosive effects of family secrets and a shallow, destructive image of love. The tension generated by this iconoclastic approach to fiction has made Murdoch's novels unique and controversial. Her fiction takes a distinctive vigor and texture from its combination of the usual elements of a tale with a sustained, sophisticated inquiry into such concepts as the defining characteristics of goodness, the nature of morality, the place of faith in everyday life and the conflict between spiritual and carnal love. When most other writers were content to dwell on the heated specifics of individual lives or to simply offer a catalogue of society's ills, Miss Murdoch dared to suggest that fiction should be a means of dealing with life's largest and most basic issues and a way to learn about moral behavior. This quest ''for a passion beyond any center of self,'' as David Bromwich wrote in The New York Times Book Review, made her fiction unlike that of any other contemporary Western writer. It also let her in for both considerable acclaim and criticism. Harold Bloom, while praising her ''formidable combination of intellectual drive and storytelling exuberance'' in a review of her novel ''The Good Apprentice'' in The Times, and noting her ''mastery'' in ''representing the maelstrom of falling in love,'' also found that her narrative voice often lacked authority, ''being too qualified and fussy.'' Anthony Burgess, while noting the highly original ''synthesis of the traditional and revolutionary'' in her work and praising her talent for creating stories that were ''both thoroughly realistic yet at the same time loaded with symbols,'' also argued in his 1967 book ''The Novel Now'' that her characters were too often ''caught up in a purely intellectual pattern.'' In a memorable phrase, he contended that, while Miss Murdoch had a rare ability ''to dredge that world of the strange and mysterious'' that rested ''on the boundary of the ordinary,'' her work rarely offered a convincing portrait of the more common realms of life. In a body of work so large, both admirers and critics were bound to find material to advance their arguments, and this was true as well in her later novels, such as ''The Message to the Planet'' (1989) and ''The Green Knight'' (1994). But neither criticism nor praise seemed much to affect her. She said that she never read her reviews. She rarely read modern writers, preferring the British and European novelists of the 19th century (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), with whom she felt an affinity, describing them as ''moralistic writers who portray the complexity of morality and the difficulty of being good.'' She lived for many years in the small village of Steeple Aston, near Oxford, in a house crowded with books and paintings. The quiet life there, and in the house in Oxford to which she moved in 1986, has been described memorably by her husband, an Oxford don, in ''Elegy for Iris,'' his memoir of their lives together. John Bayley fell in love with Iris Murdoch when he was in his late 20's and she was in her early 30's; she passed his window on a bicycle. ''I indulged the momentary fantasy that nothing had ever happened to her; that she was simply bicycling about, waiting for me to arrive,'' he wrote. ''She was not a woman with a past or an unknown present.'' They were married in 1956; he is her only close survivor. The novelist Mary Gordon, reviewing ''Elegy for Iris'' in The Times, touched on their relationship. ''Radical privacy, sealing compartments of her life off from each other, was always a condition of Iris Murdoch's selfhood, and anyone who married her had to deal with that. From the beginning, she had friendships that she kept from Bayley, and love affairs that he was meant to understand had nothing to do with him. There are some hints that this was not always easy, but Bayley rose to the challenge.'' Ms. Gordon then quotes Mr. Bayley's memoir: ''In early days, I always thought it would be vulgar -- as well as not my place -- to give any indications of jealousy, but she knew when it was there, and she soothed it just by being the self she always was with me, which I soon knew to be wholly and entirely different from any way that she was with other people.'' Slipping Into A Baffling Darkness In 1995 Miss Murdoch told an interviewer that she was experiencing severe writer's block, noting that the struggle to write had left her in ''a hard, dark place.'' In 1996, Mr. Bayley announced that she had Alzheimer's disease, which she had suffered for five years by the time she died. Her final three weeks were spent in a nursing home. If ''Elegy for Iris'' offers a moving evocation of a great love story, it also provides a grim record of watching the personality of a loved one gradually dwindle under the burden of fear, bafflement and grief. She was, Miss Murdoch confided to one of her friends, ''sailing into the darkness.'' Mr. Bayley's descriptions of his struggle to understand his wife's suffering, to find ways to ameliorate it and to come to grips with the physical demands of his new responsibilities and to understand the conflicting emotions aroused in him by the experience are exact, penetrating and unsparing. Miss Murdoch became like ''a very nice 3-year-old,'' her husband said, and she needed to be fed, bathed and changed. The note on which the book concludes, however, is one of reconciliation, and of a painfully won serenity. ''Every day,'' Mr. Bayley wrote of their lives together in Miss Murdoch's last years, ''we are physically closer. . . . She is not sailing into the dark. The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer's, she has arrived somewhere. So have I.''
Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these “confessions,” the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and explores their fruitful conjunction.
He begins by exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction—playfully, seriously, brilliantly roaming across this frontier. Good nonfiction, he believes, is crafted like a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research. Taking us on a tour of his own creative method, Eco recalls how he designed his fictional realms. He began with specific images, made choices of period, location, and voice, composed stories that would appeal to both sophisticated and popular readers. The blending of the real and the fictive extends to the inhabitants of such invented worlds. Why are we moved to tears by a character’s plight? In what sense do Anna Karenina, Gregor Samsa, and Leopold Bloom “exist”?
At once a medievalist, philosopher, and scholar of modern literature, Eco astonishes above all when he considers the pleasures of enumeration. He shows that the humble list, the potentially endless series, enables us to glimpse the infinite and approach the ineffable. This “young novelist” is a master who has wise things to impart about the art of fiction and the power of words.
人很容易遺忘，必須常溫故。昨天談胡適之先生引魯迅譯的尼采。 今天查一下我1977年在英國買的企鵝版，發現我在引文處有畫線，寫記號： In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted river and not be defiled. Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under.
O noon of life! A time to celebrate! Oh garden of summer! Restless happiness in standing, gazing, waiting:— I wait for friends, ready day and night. You friends, where are you? Come! It's time! It's time!
Was it not for you that the glacier's grayness today decked itself with roses? The stream is seeking you, and wind and clouds with yearning push themselves higher into the blue today to look for you from the furthest bird's eye view.
For you my table has been set at the highest point. Who lives so near the stars? Who's so near the furthest reaches of the bleak abyss? My realm—what realm has stretched so far? And my honey—who has tasted that? ...
There you are, my friends! —Alas, so I'm not the man, not the one you're looking for? You hesitate, surprised! —Ah, your anger would be better! Am I no more the one? A changed hand, pace, and face? And what am I—for you friends am I not the one?
Have I become another? A stranger to myself? Have I sprung from myself? A wrestler who overcame himself so often? Too often pulling against his very own power, wounded and checked by his own victory?
I looked where the wind blows most keenly? I learned to live where no one lives, in deserted icy lands, forgot men and god, curse and prayer? Became a ghost that moves over the glaciers?
—You old friends! Look! Now your gaze is pale, full of love and horror! No, be off! Do not rage! You can't live here: here between the furthest realms of ice and rock— here one must be a hunter, like a chamois.
I've become a wicket hunter! See, how deep my bow extends! It was the strongest man who made such a pull— Woe betide you! The arrow is dangerous— like no arrow—away from here! For your own good! ...
You're turning around? —O heart, you deceive enough, your hopes stayed strong: hold your door open for new friends! Let the old ones go! Let go the memory! Once you were young, now—you are even younger!
What bound us then, a band of one hope— who reads the signs, love once etched there—still pale? I compare it to parchment which the hand fears to touch—like that discoloured, burned.
No more friends—they are... But how can I name that? — Just friendly ghosts! That knocks for me at night on my window and my heart, that looks at me and says, 'But we were friends? '— —O shrivelled word, once fragrant as a rose!
O youthful longing which misunderstands itself! Those yearned for, whom I imagined changed to my own kin, they have grown old, have exiled themselves. Only the one who changes stays in touch with me.
O noon of life! A second youthful time! O summer garden! Restless happiness in standing, gazing, waiting! I wait for friends, ready day and night. You friends, where are you? Come! It's time! It's time
The song is done—the sweet cry of yearning died in my mouth: A magician did it, a friend at the right hour, a noontime friend—no! Do not ask who it might be— it was at noon when one turned into two....
Now we celebrate, certain of victory, united, the feast of feasts: friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests! Now the world laughs, the horror curtain splits, the wedding came for light and darkness....
“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Wikipedia 只英文版將此書的副標題也翻譯出 Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen) (also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra) is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of the Übermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science.[1]
[[Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (1961, trans. Hollingdale). Please note that Kaufmann is the translator of the slightly different titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None]] Reginald John Hollingdale (October 20, 1930 – September 28, 2001) was best known as a biographer and a translator of German philosophy and literature, especially the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, G. C. Lichtenberg, and Schopenhauer.
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“Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
又譬如說 本書說: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes是1871 年 Lewis Carroll 在 Through the Looking-Glass中所鑄。 以後又是一本著名小說的書名:Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is a satirical novel by Angus Wilson, published in 1956. It was Wilson's most popular book, and many consider it his best work.[1]
缺索引 TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction Bombs over Dresden and the Rosenkavalier in the Skies 1 Chapter 1: Culture: A Noble Substitute 9 Lessons in Diminished Particularity 9 A Strange Indifference to Politics 11 The German Spirit and the German Reich 16
Chapter 2: From the Republic into Exile 27 Reflections of a Political Thomas Mann 27 The Aesthetic Appeal of Fascism 36 Art and Morality 45 The Blurring of Exile and Emigration 48
Chapter 3: Novalis and Walt Whitman: German Romanticism and American Democracy 56 A Country without an Opera 56 Joseph in America 60 German Democratic Vistas 63 Emerson's Sponsors: Beethoven & Bettina 70
Chapter 4: German Culture Abroad: Victorious in Defeat 76 The Closing of the American Mind 76 The German Mind in Jeopardy 85 A Calm Good-Bye to Europe 88
Chapter 5: French-German Culture Wars 93 Two Revolutions 93 Goethe in Exile 98 "Culture Wars" and Their Origin 100 A Puzzle in the History of Sociology 105 A Mediator: Maurice Halbwachs 107 An Expulsion from Berlin 110 The Murder of Maurice Halbwachs 112 Strange Defeat 114 Intellectual Resistance 116 Limits of the German Revolution 122 Chapter 6: German Culture at Home: A Moral Failure Turned to Intellectual Advantage 128 The German Catastrophe 128 The Resurrection of Culture 134 Inner Emigration and Its Discontents 138 German and Jewish Diaspora 145
Chapter 7: The Survival of the Typical German: Faust versus Mephistopheles 154 Goethe in the Polls 154 Goethe after 1945 159
Chapter 8: German Reunification: The Failure of the Interpreting Class 165 Cultural Guardians 165 Intellectual Disaster in the East 167 Intellectual Tragicomedy 170
Chapter 9: Culture as Camouflage: The End of Central Europe 176 Europe: Dream and Bureaucracy 176 A Victory of Culture over Power 178 Chapter 10: Irony and Politics: Cultural Patriotism in Europe and the United States 186 An American Patriot from Europe 186 Hamlet and Fortinbras 190 European Pygmies and the American Giant 195 The Irony of American History 196
Chapter 11: Germany after Reunification: In Search of a Moral Masterpiece 200 Culture and Realpolitik 200 Solving Political Problems in the Field of Culture 203
Notes 211
Bibliography 237 Acknowledgments 249 Index 251
During the Allied bombing of Germany, Hitler was more distressed by the loss of cultural treasures than by the leveling of homes. Remarkably, his propagandists broadcast this fact, convinced that it would reveal not his callousness but his sensitivity: the destruction had failed to crush his artist's spirit. It is impossible to begin to make sense of this thinking without understanding what Wolf Lepenies calls The Seduction of Culture in German History. This fascinating and unusual book tells the story of an arguably catastrophic German habit--that of valuing cultural achievement above all else and envisioning it as a noble substitute for politics. Lepenies examines how this tendency has affected German history from the late eighteenth century to today. He argues that the German preference for art over politics is essential to understanding the peculiar nature of Nazism, including its aesthetic appeal to many Germans (and others) and the fact that Hitler and many in his circle were failed artists and intellectuals who seem to have practiced their politics as a substitute form of art. In a series of historical, intellectual, literary, and artistic vignettes told in an essayistic style full of compelling aphorisms, this wide-ranging book pays special attention to Goethe and Thomas Mann, and also contains brilliant discussions of such diverse figures as Novalis, Walt Whitman, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom. The Seduction of Culture in German History is concerned not only with Germany, but with how the German obsession with culture, sense of cultural superiority, and scorn of politics have affected its relations with other countries, France and the United States in particular.
Reviews: "Lepenies's reflections on French-German and American-German culture wars suggest that cultural interpretation is as much a part of the social world as any social or political fact. . . . [H]is history of an idea . . . contains important political lessons for both Europe and the United States. The substitution of culture for politics is a dangerous road to travel."--Andreas Huyssen, The Nation "At times German cultural pride has become so obsessive that it's distorted the development of society. In an audacious new book, The Seduction of Culture in German History, . . . Wolf Lepenies blames the catastrophes of 20th-century German politics on a tendency to overrate culture at the expense of politics."--Robert Fulford, National Post "The Seduction of Culture in German History, by Wolf Lepenies, offers fresh insights into the causes of the Nazi lunacy. Erudite and richly detailed, it traces the pathology of nationalist and cultural fixations, with implications for our own nervous and jingoistic age."--Peter Rose, The Australian "A highly thought-provoking . . . series of 'history of ideas' vignettes. Lepenies traces the evolution of the Kulturnation, a nation united by culture rather than by political institutions, from the 18th century, when it emerged in the absence of a central German reunification in 1990. . . . Lepenies concludes with a cautiously optimistic view of Germans' reconciliation of culture and politics. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice "[Lepenies] gives a thorough treatment of the culture wars between France and Germany, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the role culture played behind the Iron Curtain, and how the intellectuals triumphed over the communists throughout much of Eastern Europe but not in the German Democratic Republic . . .. Lepenies excels . . . in his examination of German society and its embrace of culture while shunning politics."--Victorino Matus, First Things More reviews
Contemplating Musicis a book for all serious music lovers. Here is the first full-scale of ideas and ideologies in music over the past forty years; a period during which virtually every aspect of music was transformed.
With this book, Joesph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music--with which musicology is tradtionally equated--but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism.
Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music towarda critical orientation, As examples, he presents a fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950’s and Beethoven studies in the 1960’s. He sketched the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Miltion Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster’s songs into the cannons of "black" music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Comtemplating Music is fulled with wisdom and trenchant commmentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.
Semiotext(e) is an independent publisher of critical theory, fiction, philosophy, art criticism, activist texts and non-fiction. Contents. [hide]. 1 History; 2 References ...
Best known for its introduction of French theory to American readers, Semiotext(e) has been one of America's most influential independent presses since its ...
Paul Virilio (French: [viʁiljo]; born 1932) is a French cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technologyas it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
'The first deterrence, nuclear deterrence, is presently being superseded by the second deterrence: a type of deterrence based on what I call 'the information bomb' associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future, and I stress this important point, it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.'[3]
'The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light.'[3]
'War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.'[4]
'The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.'[2]
Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. London: Continuum, 2002.
Crepuscular Dawn. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002.
Art and Fear. London: Continuum, 2003. ( originally published in 2000 by Editions Galilee under the title La Procedure Silence, meaning "The Silence Trial". )
“Where does the city without gates begin? Perhaps inside that fugitive anxiety, that shudder that seizes the minds of those who, just returning from a long vacation, contemplate the imminent encounter with mounds of unwanted mail or with a house that’s been broken into and emptied of its contents. It begins with the urge to flee and escape for a second from an oppressive technological environment, to regain one’s senses and one’s sense of self.” --from Lost Dimension Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today, it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful claustrophobia. Stock-market crises, undifferentiated terrorism, lightning pandemics, “professional” suicides . . . . Fear has become the world we live in. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Virilio himself referred to his 1980 work The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a "juncture" in his thinking, one at which he brought his focus onto the logistics of perception—a logistics he would soon come to refer to as the "vision machine." If Speed and Politics established Virilio as the inaugural—and still consummate—theorist of "dromology" (the theory of speed and the society it defines), The Aesthetics of Disappearance introduced his understanding of "picnolepsy"—the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject t Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Speed and Politics (first published in France in 1977) is the matrix of Virilio's entire work. Building on the works of Morand, Marinetti, and McLuhan, Virilio presents a vision more radically political than that of any of his French contemporaries: speed as the engine of destruction. Speed and Politics presents a topological account of the entire history of humanity, honing in on the technological advances made possible through the militarization of society. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
There is a catastrophe within contemporary art. What I call the "optically correct" is at stake. The vision machine and the motor have triggered it, but the visual arts haven't learned from it. Instead, they've masked this failure with commercial success. This "accident" is provoking a reversal of values. In my view, this is positive: the accident reveals something important we would not otherwise know how to perceive. —Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The accident is a new form of warfare. It is replacing revolution and war. Sarajevo triggered the First World War. New York is what Sarajevo was. September 11th opened Pandora's box. The first war of globalization will be the global accident, the total accident, including the accident of science. And it is on the way.
In 1968, Virilio abandoned his work in oblique architecture, believing that time had replaced space as the most important point of reflection because of the dominance of speed. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
In A Landscape of Events, the celebrated French architect, urban planner, and philosopher Paul Virilio focuses on the cultural chaos of the 1980s and 1990s. It was a time, he writes, that reflected the "cruelty of an epoch, the hills and dales of daily life, the usual clumps of habits and commonplaces." Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Based upon a 1996 conversation Paul Virilio had with French journalist Phillipe Petit, The Politics of the Very Worst summarizes Virilio's speculations about the impact that accidents will have on the planet now that we operate on one-world time. Virilio argues that accidents have now lost all particularity. Accidents and events can no longer be confined to markers in history like Auschwitz or Hiroshima. Trajectories once had three dimensions: past, present, and future. But now, the hyper-concentration of time into "real time" reduces all trajectories to nothing. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
To read these five essays of 1983 is to begin to come to terms with the theoretical cataclysm of the present. In Lost Dimension, Paul Virilio considers the displacement of the concept of dimensional space by Einsteinian space/time as it is related to the transparent boundaries of the postmodern city and contemporary economy. Virilio imagines a coming world of interactive, informational networks offering a prison-house of illusionary transcendence. He pictures global terrorism (perpetrated by and against technological states) filling up the surreal void of an abandoned real. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Sir D'Arcy W. Thompson CB FRS FRSE (1860-1948) was a Scottish biologist, mathematician, and classics scholar. A pioneering mathematical biologist, he is mainly remembered as the author of ON GROWTH AND FORM, an influential work of striking originality and elegance.
The central theme of ON GROWTH AND FORM is that biologists of its author's day overemphasized evolution as the fundamental determinant of the form and structure of living organisms, and under-emphasized the roles of physical laws and mechanics.
Peter Medawar who was the 1960 Nobel Laureate in Medicine called ON GROWTH AND FORM "the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue."
Meyer (Mike) Howard Abrams (July 23, 1912 – April 21, 2015), usually cited as MH Abrams , was an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, ...
"The Norton Anthology of English Literature" celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Dialogue
Built to Last
By MH ABRAMS and STEPHEN GREENBLATT
Published: August 23, 2012
Fi fty years ago this fall, undergraduates were assigned their first Norton Anthology, often the only required text for a college freshman's survey of English literature. Here, MH Abrams, the founding general editor, and Stephen Greenblatt, the current general editor, discuss the history of the anthology, the challenges facing English literature survey courses and the enduring question, Why study literature?
How much has the anthology changed over the years?
MH Abrams: It's gotten bigger. Unfortunately, there's a limit to that. The important thing is that the student be able to carry it to class and read it anywhere, including under a tree as the original preface said. I think we still do say that.
Stephen Greenblatt: We still do indeed say that in your honor, even though I don't know how many trees have been cut to make it possible.
Abrams: When I undertook the original job of general editor, I thought of it as the work of one clear summer. Well, it was four very hard-working years before the thing finally appeared. And it's a difficult project. But it's worthwhile because you're presenting literature to students, many of them for the first time. And when you succeed you've done something very important and very satisfying.
Greenblatt: The anthology changes, but it is meant to last. Even now in its somewhat bulky form, people keep their Norton Anthology for their whole lives. And they do that for a reason. They do it because they sense that it's not something that just comes and goes. They trust it and want to return to it. That's something again that our culture has too little of and that the anthology has passionately served.
Abrams: One of the pleasures of being an editor of the anthology is to meet middle-aged people who say: “I still have the Norton Anthology that I used 20 years ago. I have it at my bed's head, and I read it at night, and I enjoy it.” It's a pleasure that you don't outgrow the anthology. It's oriented toward undergraduates, but it's used by graduate students in preparing for their oral examinations. It continues to be read by people who were introduced to it 20, 25, 30 years ago in their classes. That's a great joy for an editor.
The Norton Anthology plays a crucial role in a humanities curriculum that is said to be under great pressure. Have you noticed the effects of this pressure?
Greenblatt: Of course we have noticed. The issue is not so much the anthology, but rather the fate of the whole enterprise of studying what Matthew Arnold called the best which has been thought and said in the world. For generations that enterprise occupied a key place in college and university education everywhere, but there are signs that it is in trouble. Humanities departments are fretting about a decline in majors, and those students who do major in literature, art, philosophy and history often clamor only for contemporary topics.
Has the Norton Anthology then lost its relevance?
Greenblatt: Not at all. The Norton Anthology was based on the idea that it actually matters to plunge into a comic masterpiece written in the 1300s or to weep at a tragedy performed in the 1700s. What would it mean for a culture to give up on its past? It is vitally important to remind people that the humanities carry the experience, the life-forms of those who came before us, into the present and into the future. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them. Besides — as many studies have shown — cultural knowledge turns out to be good for your career.
You have noted a turn away from the past among students and their teachers. Are there signs of a counter-trend back toward the basics?
Greenblatt: When I teach a course with my colleague Louis Menand that starts with Homer and goes up to Joyce, the pressure on enrollment is huge, because it turns out many students — without the compulsion of their teachers — feel that they really shouldn't go through their undergraduate years without reading the great imaginative works of the past.
Abrams: One of the joys of teaching with the anthology is to watch the excitement grow as students, who may think the past dull and irrelevant, find how fresh and new and powerful are the kinds of writings that are hundreds of years old.
Greenblatt: Amen to that.
What texts have been particularly painful to remove from the print edition.
Abrams: I love the Romantic period, and I developed a corpus of texts to be included, which I thought were indispensable. It turned out that there was not room for more than half of what I proposed. Every removal was like pulling a tooth. But I finally gave in to the common good.
Greenblatt: I love certain long Renaissance poems such as George Gascoigne's “Woodmanship.” We included it; very few people taught it; so out it came. But my pain was alleviated because we now offer the poem in a fully annotated, completely teachable downloadable form in the supplemental e-book. The situation that Mike faced when he revised the anthology — when something comes out of the print pages, it ceases to circulate — is not the situation we're in now. So we can make practical decisions as to what is most teachable and usable and at the same time not give up those things we feel passionately about but that may not be for everyone.
For a prospective undergraduate reading this Q. and A., how would you answer the question, Why study literature?
Abrams: Ha — Why live? Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you're doing. It shows you possibilities you haven't thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable. There's no end to the response you can make to that question, but Stephen has a few things to add.
Greenblatt: Literature is the most astonishing technological means that humans have created, and now practiced for thousands of years, to capture experience. For me the thrill of literature involves entering into the life worlds of others. I'm from a particular, constricted place in time, and I suddenly am part of a huge world — other times, other places, other inner lives that I otherwise would have no access to.
Abrams: Yes. Literature makes life much more worth living.
Greenblatt: You speak with the full wisdom of your hundred years of life.
Abrams: That's portentous enough.
MH Abrams is the founding editor of “The Norton Anthology of English Literature.” Stephen Greenblatt, the current general editor, is the John Cogan university professor of the humanities at Harvard and author, most recently, of “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.”
Hendrik Willem van Loon (January 14, 1882 – March 11, 1944) was a Dutch-Americanhistorian, journalist, and award-winning children's book author. 過世後60年，還有人幫他寫傳
Van Loon's Geography: The Story of the World We Live In, 1932, Simon and Schuster
To Have or to Be—Take Your Choice, John Day (1932)
"Gold" 1933, article from the Cosmopolitan March 1933
An Elephant Up a Tree, 1933, Simon and Schuster
An Indiscreet Itinerary or How the Unconventional Traveler Should See Holland by one who was actually born there and whose name is Hendrik Willem Van Loon, 1933, Harcourt, Brace
The Home of Mankind: the story of the world we live in, 1933, George G. Harrap
The story of inventions: Man, the Miracle Maker, 1934, Horace Liveright
Ships: and How They Sailed the Seven Seas (5000 B.C.-A.D.1935), 1935, Simon and Schuster
Around the World With the Alphabet, 1935, Simon and Schuster
Air-Storming: A Collection of 40 Radio Talks, 1935, Harcourt, Brace
Love me not, 1935
A World Divided is a World Lost, 1935, Cosmos Publishing Co.
The Songs We Sing (with Grace Castagnetta), 1936, Simon and Schuster
The Arts (with musical illustrations by Grace Castagnetta), 1937, Simon and Schuster
Christmas Carols (with Grace Castagnetta), 1937, Simon and Schuster
Observations on the mystery of print and the work of Johann Gutenberg, 1937, Book Manufacturer's Institute/New York Times
Our Battle: Being One Man's Answer to "My Battle" by Adolf Hitler, 1938, Simon and Schuster
How to Look at Pictures: a Short History of Painting, 1938, National Committee for Art Appreciation
Folk Songs of Many Lands (with Grace Castagnetta), 1938, Simon and Schuster
The Last of the Troubadours: The Life and Music of Carl Michael Bellman 1740-1795 (with Grace Castagnetta), 1939, Simon and Schuster
The Songs America Sings (with Grace Castagnetta), 1939, Simon and Schuster
Invasion, being the personal recollections of what happened to our own family and to some of our friends during the first forty-eight hours of that terrible incident in our history which is now known as the great invasion and how we escaped with our lives, 1940, Harcourt, Brace
Good Tidings (with Christmas songs by Grace Castegnetta), 1941, American Artists Group
The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, with a short life of the Author by Hendrik Willem van Loon of Rotterdam who also illustrated the Book, 1942
Van Loon's Lives: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as dinner guests in a bygone year, 1942, Simon and Schuster
Christmas Songs, 1942
The Message of the Bells (with music by Grace Castagnetta), 1942, New York Garden City
The Life and Times of Scipio Fulhaber, Chef de Cuisine, 1943
Adventures and Escapes of Gustavus Vasa, and how they carried him from his rather obscure origin to the throne of Sweden, 1945
Report to Saint Peter, upon the kind of world in which Hendrik Willem van Loon spent the first years of his life - an unfinished, posthumously published autobiography, 1947, Simon and Schuster
My School Books was a chapter from the unpublished autobiography of Hendrik Willem van Loon made by the DuPont chemical company to demonstrate their new 'PX Cloth' on school books, and distributed free at the New York Worlds Fair in 1939
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
人類的故事亨德里克．房龍 著 / 吳奚貞 譯 協志工業叢書出版公司 2006年當 代歷史家亨德里克．房龍（Hendrik Willem van Loon）以他一貫淺顯的語言，輕鬆流暢的筆法，為我們敘述人類五十萬年歷史的演變和大事，全書洋溢著作者的智慧，人情味和幽默感，配上作者親自繪製的精 美插圖，讓讀者讀來趣味盎然，印象深刻而對歷史有初步的認識。這是一部信史，是學習歷史的入門書；但讀起來卻像一部迷人的小說。
《輕率的旅行》(暫名)(1933)英文名：An Indiscreet Itinerary or How the Unconventional Traveler Should See Holland by one who was actually born there and whose name is Hendrik Willem Van loon
《上樹的大象》(暫名)（1933）英文名：An Elephant Up a Tree
《人類的家園》（1933）英文名：The Home of Mankind: the story of the world we live in
《發明的故事》（1934）英文名：The story of inventions: Man, the Miracle Maker
《船：它們如何在七大洋航行》(暫名)（1935）英文名：Ships: and How They Sailed the Seven Seas (5000 B.C.-A.D.1935)
《與字母一起漫遊世界》(1935)英文名：Around the World With the Alphabet
《廣播風暴》(暫名)(1935)英文名：Air-Storming: A Collection of 40 Radio Talks
《勿愛我》(暫名)(1935 )英文名：Love me not
《分裂的世界是迷失的世界》(暫名)(1935)英文名：A World Divided is a World Lost
《見證印刷術的謎團與約翰古騰堡的貢獻》(暫名)(1937)英文名：Observations on the mystery of print and the work of Johann Gutenberg
《我們的奮鬥:對阿道夫·希特勒<我的奮鬥>回答》(暫名)（1938）英文名：Our Battle: Being One Man's Answer to "My Battle" by Adolf Hitler
《西方美術簡史》（1938）英文名：How to Look at Pictures: a Short History of Painting
《眾土民歌》(暫名)(1938)英文名：Folk Songs of Many Lands
《最後的吟遊詩人》(暫名)(1939)英文名：The Last of the Troubadours: The Life and Music of Carl Michael Bellman 1740-1795
《唱遍美國的歌》(暫名)(1939)英文名：The Songs America Sings
《我的課本》(暫名)(1939)英文名：My School Books
《入侵》(暫名)(1940)英文名：Invasion, being the personal recollections of what happened to our own family and to some of our friends during the first forty-eight hours of that terrible incident in our history which is now known as the great invasion and how we escaped with our lives
《約翰·塞巴斯蒂安·巴赫的生平與時代》（1940）英文名：The Life and Times of Johann Sebastian Bach
《喜訊》(暫名)(1941)英文名：Good Tidings
《伊拉斯謨的《 <愚人頌>及作者簡介》(暫名)(1942 )英文名：The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, with a short life of the Author by Hendrik Willem van Loon of Rotterdam who also illustrated the Book
《與世界偉人談心》又名《天堂對話》(1942)英文名：Van Loon's Lives: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as dinner guests in a bygone year
《聖誕歌》(暫名)(1942)英文名：Christmas Songs
《鈴鐺的訊息》(暫名)(1942)英文名：The Message of the Bells
《托馬斯·傑弗遜》《西蒙·玻利瓦爾的生平與時代》（原版為一本書）（1943）英文名：Fighters for Freedom: the Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar
《廚師長西庇阿·菲拉貝的生平與時代》(暫名)(1943)英文名：The Life and Times of Scipio Fulhaber, Chef de Cuisine
《古斯塔夫·瓦薩的冒險和逃走》(暫名)(1945)英文名：Adventures and Escapes of Gustavus Vasa, and how they carried him from his rather obscure origin to the throne of Sweden
《致天堂守門人》(1947)英文名：Report to Saint Peter, upon the kind of world in which Hendrik Willem van Loon spent the first years of his life - an unfinished, posthumously published autobiography
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus --Live with the gods. 【Marcus Aurelius Antoninus A.D. 121–180. Philosopher and emperor of Rome (161–180). His philosophical autobiography Meditations is a classic work of stoicism.這本著作的中文譯本，可能超過10本。也許你可考慮和梁實秋先生一起思辨之。】
羅馬帝國最興盛時期的奧里略皇帝（Marcus Aurelius）寫了《沉思錄》（Meditation），是他在跟蠻族打完仗後的夜霧瀰漫中，一個人在寂寞安靜的帳篷裡寫下的思維（Ta Eis Auton）。他認為靈魂也就是心智，是一個人唯一可以控制的東西。控制自己的心智就控制自己的思想進而控制自己的行動；良知就是知曉真理，口中說必真理，與人言必真理，一切生活都在真理中，要在生命的戰爭中為真理的戰役奮戰不懈。生命的意義就是要瞭解人生的責任是什麼，並竭盡所能去完成它，錯誤的知識和智慧是鏡花水月，它們會牽著你的鼻子走入歧途，我們必須在正邪之間清楚地抉擇，從而彰顯生命的真正意義。
T. H. Tsien, a scholar of Chinese books and printing who in 1941 risked his life to smuggle ... Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. T. H. Tsien was one of the world’s renowned scholars of Chinese bibliography and paleography, the study of ancient writing.CreditUniversity of Chicago
T. H. Tsien, a scholar of Chinese books and printing who in 1941 risked his life to smuggle tens of thousands of rare volumes to safety amid the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, died on April 9 at his home in Chicago. He was 105.
His death was announced by the University of Chicago, with which he had been associated since the late 1940s. At his death, he was an emeritus professor of East Asian languages and civilizations there and an emeritus curator of the university’s East Asian library.
One of the world’s most renowned scholars of Chinese bibliography and paleography — the study of ancient writing — Professor Tsien (pronounced chee-AHN) was the author of scores of books and articles, many in English, about the august history of the written word in China. As he was fond of reminding people, movable type originated in Chinacenturies before Gutenberg.
Professor Tsien, who was born in China in the twilight of the reign of its last emperor, was a young librarian there during the Japanese occupation, which lasted from 1931 until the end of World War II. Working in secret, he was charged with keeping a trove of precious volumes, some dating to the first millennium B.C., from falling into the occupiers’ hands.
The Library of Congress in Washington agreed to take some 30,000 volumes, but the difficulty lay in getting them out of Shanghai. By 1941, the city’s harbor and customs office were under the control of the Japanese, who would have seized the books and very likely destroyed them. Had Professor Tsien’s work been uncovered, he would almost certainly have been executed.
Determined to get the books out of China at all costs, Professor Tsien could not have done so, he later wrote, had it not been for a turn of fate.
Tsuen-hsuin Tsien was born on Dec. 1, 1909, in the Jiangsu Province of eastern China. As a youth, he edited a student publication advocating the overthrow of the warlords who since the 1910s had been savagely partitioning the country. Soon afterward, he and his teacher were arrested by a local warlord’s henchmen.
Young Mr. Tsien was released; the teacher was executed. Mr. Tsien joined the Nationalist Army, which in 1928 helped defeat the warlords, unifying China.
At the University of Nanking (now Nanjing), Mr. Tsien studied Chinese and Western history and library science, earning an undergraduate degree in 1932. He later went to work in the Nanjing branch of China’s national library.
In 1937, at grave risk, Mr. Tsien fled Nanjing with more than a dozen family members just before the Japanese massacre there. The massacre, known ever after as the Rape of Nanking, resulted in the killing of more than 300,000 civilians and the raping of more than 80,000 women. Settling in Shanghai, he joined the national library’s branch there.
In the wake of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, some 60,000 rare books, among China’s foremost cultural treasures, had been moved from Beijing to Shanghai for safekeeping. After Japan seized Shanghai in 1937, the books — including those Mr. Tsien would smuggle out of China — were secreted in the city’s French Concessionand International Settlement.
Long-term plans for the volumes were essential, but the question remained: How to get them past customs?
Mr. Tsien agonized over the problem for the next few years. Then, in 1941, an old schoolmate of his wife’s came for a visit. The schoolmate had a brother who happened to be a customs agent. Mr. Tsien recruited the agent to his cause.
Covertly packing 30,000 of the books into 102 wooden crates, Mr. Tsien labeled them, on the agent’s advice, as new books purchased by the Library of Congress. In the guise of a bookseller, he created false invoices to accompany the shipments.
The crates left the Port of Shanghai a few at a time, moving through customs when Mr. Tsien’s confederate was on duty. The last one left China on Dec. 5, 1941, two days before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
At the Library of Congress, the books were microfilmed for posterity — an enterprise, entailing more than a thousand rolls of film, that has made them accessible to scholars worldwide.
In 1947, Mr. Tsien was dispatched to the United States to retrieve the books. But the outbreak of civil war between China’s Communists and its ruling Nationalists precluded his returning home.
Accepting an invitation from the University of Chicago library to catalog its Chinese holdings, he went on to earn a master’s degree in library science from the university in 1952, followed by a Ph.D. in library science and East Asian studies there in 1957. Over the coming decades, Professor Tsien built the university’s collection of East Asian books into one of the foremost in the United States.
Professor Tsien’s wife, Wen-ching Hsu Tsien, died in 2008, as did a daughter, Ginger Tsien. His survivors include two other daughters, Mary Tsien Dunkel and Gloria Tsien; a sister, Cunrou Qian; a brother, Cunxue Qian; and two step-grandchildren.
Among his laurels is the Distinguished Service Award from the National Library of China, which he received in 1999. In 2007, Nanjing University opened the T. H. Tsien Library, seeded with thousands of volumes from his personal collection.
The books Professor Tsien rescued from Shanghai were given to Taiwan by the United States in the mid-1960s. They remain there, housed at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Professor Tsien tried for years to have them returned to the national library in Beijing, but because of historical tensions between Taiwan and mainland China he was never able to do so.
In interviews, Professor Tsien was sometimes asked why he assumed so grave a risk to smuggle books out of China. His reply was simple.
“It was my duty,” he said.
Correction: April 19, 2015 An earlier version of a summary that appeared with this obituary on the home page of NYTimes.com referred incorrectly to T.H. Tsien as a woman.
Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien 錢存訓
Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien 錢存訓, Professor Emeritus in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Curator Emeritus of the East Asian Library of the University of Chicago, was born in 1910 in Taixian 泰縣, Jiangsu, China, as he says in the first line of his memoir, “during the reign of the last Emperor of the Imperial Dynasty.” Over the course of his extraordinarily eventful life, he has made numerous contributions to the study and preservation of China’s literary heritage. After graduating from Jinling University in Nanjing in 1932, he worked first as assistant librarian of Jiaotong University Library in Shanghai and then as director of the newly opened Engineering Reference Library at Nanjing, a branch of the Beiping Library. In 1941, during China’s War Against Japan, he risked his life to ship 30,000 volumes of rare books to the United States for safe-keeping. In 1947, he moved to the United States, beginning a career at the University of Chicago that would span eight decades: as a student (he received his Ph.D. from the University in 1957), professor (he was promoted to professor in 1964), and librarian (he was appointed librarian in 1947, and held the post until his retirement in 1978). The author of several monographs and more than 150 scholarly articles, Professor Tsien’s Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginning of Chinese Books and Inscriptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1st edition, 1962; 2nd revised edition, 2004) and the Paper and Printing volume (Volume 5.1) for Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) are regarded as classics of Sinological scholarship and have been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The teacher of two generations of Chinese librarians in America, Professor Tsien resides in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
最近一個甲子，對於在美國從事中國研究的學生、學者而言，「錢存訓」的大名跟 「中國文化」、「圖書版本」幾乎是一個同義詞。一九九一年台北和北京出版了《中國圖書文史論集——錢存訓先生八十榮慶紀念》，二○○六年北京圖書館及台灣 的圖書館學會又分別推出《南山論學集——錢存訓先生九五生日紀念》與《中國圖書館學會會報．錢存訓教授九秩晉五祝壽專號》祝賀他的華誕。錢先生的生平事 跡，他的門生與朋友寫了很多。關於他的家世，卻只提及曾祖父乃道光朝進士，祖父精於書畫，父親曾是佛學雜誌《海潮音》主編。我認識錢先生四十多年了，亦僅 耳聞他是屬於「書香世家」的一族，直到讀了《留美雜憶——六十年來美國生活的回顧》（台北傳記文學出版社，二○○七年；合肥黃山書社，二○○八年），才發 現他首次自述﹕「我的家庭是社會上一般人所稱頌的『書香世家』，美國人所羨慕的『帝王後裔』。所謂『帝王後裔』，緣自錢氏宗譜中的始祖是五代吳越國王錢鏐 （八五二—九三四）。據說他文武雙全，奠定了『上有天堂、下有蘇杭』的富庶地區。到了雷峰塔刻經的第五代錢俶歸附趙宋，錢氏統治了這一地區將近一百 年。」（頁三，傳記文學版，餘同） 上面這段話，我有兩點感想。其一，錢先生溫、良、恭、儉、讓的涵養，是大家所熟知的。到了將近一百歲的時候，才寫出自己比較詳盡的「家庭背景」，透露出 「帝王後裔」的信息。這不但意味著他對史實存真的態度，而且也給我們這些後輩一點驚喜。其次，他說明「帝王後裔」是「美國人所羨慕」的。近世以還，國人對 專制皇朝的「帝王」印象欠佳。美國有些人出於名人崇拜的心態，卻很羨慕英國的皇族。因此，他便引用「美國人」的口氣來磘述，可見其用心良苦矣！ 捨「旅美」而取「留美」 這本書的標題，捨「旅美」而取「留美」，也許有特別的寓意。錢先生本來並不打算長期「旅居」異域，無奈迫於現實，只能久「留」不歸。而且，他認為自己是 一個「留學生」而不是「僑民」。事實上，他在美國的心路歷程，諸如讀書、工作、教學、研究、寫作、出版與每個階段的閱歷與磨煉，正是絕大多數跟他同時代的 中國留美學者的真實寫照。由於他的學術貢獻和文化活動是多面性的，這部個人紀錄，也可說是近代中美兩國文化、學術、教育的歷史縮影。 《留美雜憶》的內容，既不「雜」也不亂，乃有條不紊而且全面涵蓋了錢先生的典 型文人生涯的生動紀錄。全書的正文六章包括﹕《國內經歷》、《定居芝城》、《工讀十年》、《坐擁書城》、《教研一得》、《退而未休》。另有六章附錄：《家 世淵源》、《先德遺墨》、《作者生平》、《著述評論》、《師友懷念》、《福杯滿溢》。正文是一氣呵成的「編年體」自傳。錢先生說自己原沒有寫回憶錄的念 頭。因為訪問的人很多，為了避免重複回答，才改變初衷，從頭寫起。再者，此書副題說是居住美國的回顧，但《國內經歷》那一章，卻甚重要。錢先生回憶：「早 年熱心革命，為軍閥逮捕，但大難不死，卻因此得以接受高等教育……。」 （頁二）許倬雲先生在序言中所說的「溫良正直」，便是從少年時期培養出來的品格，以至一生中有立德、立功、立言的成就。附錄各章，乃是資料的匯集。錢先生 的學術交遊，在《師友懷念》一章可見一斑。至於《福杯滿溢》的文字，是錢師母的作品。讀後教人相信美滿的家庭與成功的人生是相輔相成的。 成名作《書於竹帛》 作為一名讀者，我很佩服錢先生蒐集文獻與圖片等資料的功力。而他著述考慮周全，舉凡一言一事、一人一物，都擺布得四平八穩，交代得一清二楚。結論在平實 中有創見，在創見中又極具啟發與說服力。舉例來說，他的成名作《書於竹帛：中國古代的文字記錄》（Written on Bamboo and Silk），牽涉的範圍極廣，諸如古文字學，文字載體如甲骨、金石、簡牘、帛書、紙卷，以及書寫工具如筆、墨、硯、刀等各種文物，都是素材。我們試想，一 門甲骨或青銅器，就足夠讓一組專家做長期研究了，錢先生卻憑一己之力，在半工半讀的情形下，抱著「竭澤而漁」的態度，把這些材料不厭其煩地進行了「地毯 式」的清查。當我們讀了經過「爬梳統整、董理序次」的資料性章節之後，分析性的「結論」便水到渠成，一切問題都能迎刃而解了。怪不得這篇博士學位論文一經 出版，立刻被譽為「經典之作」，於是，李約瑟（Joseph Needham）所編《中國科學技術史》（Science and Civilisation in China）大系中的《紙和印刷》（Paper and Printing）一冊，執筆者則非錢先生莫屬。 * 錢存訓《中國古代書史》香港：中文大學，1975 (本書根據周寧森翻譯《書於竹帛》增訂而成) 竹帛編製的典冊，是紙張印刷圖書之濫觴。那麼，《紙和印刷》就是《書於竹 帛》的續篇了。錢先生曾說，李氏請他合作這個寫作計劃，正是「不謀而合」（頁六九）。我認為，他們合作獲得的成果「相得益彰」，而且可說是國際文壇上的一 段佳話。李氏雖是知名的生化學者，「他不是科班出身的漢學家；而且思想左傾，受到一些英國學者的攻擊。」（頁二五四）更嚴重的是，「李氏在朝鮮戰爭期間， 曾參與世界和平理事會……指控美國曾經使用細菌，引起美國官方對這一指控感到憤怒……從此他便一直為美國政府列入不受歡迎人士的黑名單。」（頁二五九）一 九七六年李氏赴美接受芝加哥大學所贈榮譽博士學位一事， 全是錢先生幕後的策劃與接洽。可見錢先生對「文字結緣」友人的誠懇與熱情， 而李氏於闊別三十年後重遊 「花旗土地」，也「認為在他晚年的多次旅行中最高興而具有象徵性的一次訪問」（頁二五九）。
《紙和印刷》專題權威著述 《紙和印刷》是英美學術出版界一個非常成功的例子。它原定篇幅限於一百頁，最後李氏同意擴充為三十萬言約五百頁的巨著。初版在發行前就被預訂一空，結果 續印三次， 是《中國科學技術史》 大系中銷路最好的一冊 。學術界早已公認這本著作是專業的百科全書， 也是專題的權威著述。中國人雖然最先發明了印刷術，可是，有系統的印刷史研究則有待於一九二五年卡特（T. F. Carter）那部《中國印刷術的發明和它的西傳》（Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward）名著的出現。一九八五年《紙和印刷》的出版，可說是卡特之後，錢先生將六十年來的考古與研究的成果，做了一次總結。另一方面，他對國內 日漸蓬勃的學術風氣，尤其是對這個專題的研究，以及中國文化對世界文明的貢獻，也有一定程度的影響。
歷史之構成，是在時間長河中某地之人或某些人在某地所呈現之具體事物和抽象思想，概言之，包含人、地、事。如果臺灣史研究採取「屬地主義」，即是在臺灣這塊土地上曾有過的種種人所發生的事，那麼1603年陳第寫的《東番記》當是外人對臺灣平埔族最早直接觀察所作的紀錄。20多年後，荷蘭傳教士甘治士（Rev. George Candidius）也對同一主題作了記載。早期臺灣這塊土地主人的圖像，在這兩份原始紀錄所呈現的異同透露什麼歷史信息，是值得考察的課題。
前近代臺灣史的論述以地方誌的形式呈現為大宗。清帝國官修方誌有既定的規範，其體例往往透露統治者對臺灣的興趣所在和看法，不同時期所修的方誌綜合起來便構成對臺灣的歷史認識。近代以前臺灣方誌以清修為大宗，但荷蘭Francois Valentijn的《新舊東印度誌》（Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien）已有關於福爾摩沙的地誌記載，可見方誌呈現的統治觀點有其根本共同性。
歷史的書寫雖然沒人敢說絕對的公正客觀，但相對性是絕對存在的，至少像耶穌會士馮秉正（Father de Mailla）18世紀初期對臺灣的記述，應該是比較客觀的吧。19世紀西方旅行者或探險家所觀察的臺灣，雖被中國民族主義貼上帝國主義標籤，他們筆下的臺灣會比統治者遠離事實嗎？這些來臺久暫不一的觀察拼湊成的歷史圖像，是否如Lambert van der Aalsvoort的資料彙編《福爾摩沙見聞錄》，用「風中之葉」體現臺灣不能自主的命運？
“A Synopsis of Works on Ancient Chinese History Published in Taiwan, 1982-1987, ” Early China 14 (1989)，據〈近五年來臺灣地區中國上古史研究書目簡介〉翻譯，《漢學研究通訊》7.1 (1988)：1-7。
“The City-State in Ancient China,” Studies in Chinese and Western Classical Civilizations—Essays in Honour of Prof. Lin Zhi-chun on his 90th Birthday（《中西古典文明研究——慶祝林志純教授90華誕論文集》）（吉林人民出版社，1999），頁425-441。
“The ‘Animal Style’ Revisited, Translated and edited by Roderick Whitfield and Wang Tao,” Exploring China’s Past: New Discoveries and Studies in Archaeology and Art (London: Saffron, 1999), pp. 137-149.
