Lucas Klein on Daniel Dooghan’s Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature

Lu Xun and World LiteratureDissertation Reviews has posted my review of Daniel Dooghan’s Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature. Here’s how it begins:

In his entry in the 2004 report on the state of the discipline, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, David Damrosch, doyen of world literature studies, reproduces a table showing the MLA citation index of Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881 – 1936) over the previous four decades. According this bibliography, Lu Xun was referred to in 3 articles between 1964 and 1973, in 12 articles from 1974 to 1983, in 19 articles from 1984 to 1993, and in 22 articles between 1994 and 2003 (David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Haun Saussy (ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 49). Without question, in what may be the disciplinary “age of world literature” even more than “an age of globalization,” Lu Xun has entered into a certain kind of canonicity. Investigating and interrogating the specifics of that canonicity, and the ways in which Lu Xun is framed, understood, translated, and transformed via such canonicity, is the subject of Daniel Dooghan’s fascinating, revealing, and provocative dissertation, Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature (University of Minnesota, 2011).