The Promise and Premise of Creativity: Why Comparative Literature Matters [Paperback]

The Promise and Premise of Creativity considers literature in the larger context of globalization and the clash of cultures. Refuting the view that the study of literature is useless, Eoyang argues that it expands three distinct intellectual skills: creative imagination, vicarious sympathy, and capacious intuition.

With the advent of the personal computer and the blurring of cultural and economic boundaries, it is the ability to imagine, to intuit, and to invent that will mark the educated student, and allow her to survive the rapid pace of change. As never before, the ability to empathize with other peoples, to understand cultures very different from one's own, is vital to success in a globalized world. In this, the very uselessness of literature may inure the mind to think creatively.

Engaging with both the theory and practice of literature, its past and its potential future, Eoyang claims that our sense of the world at large, of the salient similarities and differences between cultures, would be critically diminished without comparative literature.

Argues for the usefulness of reading and studying literature by considering comparative literature in the larger context of globalization and the clash of cultures.

Eugene Eoyang is Professor Emeritus of English, Humanities, Translation, and General Education at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China, and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, USA. He is the author of five books, including The Transparent Eye: Translation, Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 'Borrowed Plumage': Polemical Essays on Translation (Rodopi Publishers, 2003), and Two-Way Mirrors: Cross-Cultural Studies in Glocalization (Lexington Books, 2007) as well as the editor of three volumes, including Ai Qing: Selected Poems, Edited with an Introduction and Notes (The Foreign Languages Press/Indiana Universitl,