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Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and Scripts of Culture . By Andrea Bachner . New York : Columbia University Press , 2014. xii, 282 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $49.99 (ebook).
Book Reviews--China
Readers who open Beyond Sinology expecting a critique of Chinese studies may be surprised to discover that the title means "considering writing as more than just a sign system" (p. 215). The book explores the use of Chinese characters in a variety of media. The introduction, "Script Politics," discusses the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, in which acrobats dramatized the history of Chinese characters for international audiences. Bachner then discusses the early language reformers who believed that characters were obsolete. In fact, because the "mediality of characters" adapts to computers, "Chinese writing has rid itself of the burden of the oral principle" (p. 11).
Chapter 1, "Corpographies," considers "Death and the Sinograph." According to Bachner, a "strange strain of necrophilia" attracted early language reformers (p. 23). The chapter draws parallels with the French literary theory of "the necrotic process" of language. For Jacques Derrida, for example, the character is a silent "other." Roger Chartier deplores "the extreme violence inherent in writing" (p. 46). To Jacques Lacan, characters symbolize "an absence," like the "'symbolically castrated penis as Phallus'" (p. 32). Nihilism also inspires Chinese artist Zhang Huan to film himself naked on a toilet, covered with flies; or to paint...