The Hypothetical Mandarin Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain

Download or read book The Hypothetical Mandarin Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain written by Eric Hayot and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the former would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1835), this book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. Hayots wide-ranging discussion draws on accounts of torture, on medical case studies, travelers tales, photographs, plasticized corpses, polemical broadsides, watercolors, and on oil paintings. His analyses show that the historical connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "China," and why the story of the West's Chinese pain goes to the heart of the relation between language and the body and the social experience of the modern human being.