In a high-context culture like Chinese, the linguistic code encompasses only part of the message and is incomplete without context. One of the implicit codes embedded in high-context communication is color tropes. Highly recognizable in the Sinophone world, color tropes often manifest themselves in the forms of metaphor, metonymy, allusions, and similes and are often related to the conveyance of emotional content. This paper provides a selection and discussion of such color tropes, demonstrates that color in a language inspires (...) associations and connotations that are often very subtle and determined by deep cultural memory, and, giving several Chinese examples, shows how the primary semasiology of a color term often influences its subsequent semantic extension. (shrink)

Cet article étudie les moyens d’argumentation dans les lettres familières rédigées par les apprenants sinophones du français langue étrangère de niveau B2. Les lettres sont contrastées à celles des francophones et des sinophones natifs représentant un groupe de contrôle. Les résultats montrent certains contrastes entre les groupes des natifs. Quant aux apprenants, on voit qu’ils utilisent en partie les mêmes stratégies argumentatives que les francophones, mais on atteste également des influences de leur langue maternelle dans le choix des procédés persuasifs.

The unprecedented power of China and its cultural expansion are increasing the need to examine its hegemonic impact in the field of literature. The new concept of ‘sinophone’, inspired by postcolonial criticism, reveals vigorous protests against Mainland’s centrality by advocating Chinese Diaspora literature, which has been too long relegated to a peripheral status. This study seeks to reconsider such debates through investigations of historical reasons, ideological issues, and perspectives they have widened. The sinophone literature is thus set up (...) as a creative space, denationalized as well as transnationalized. Denying both the weight of the matrix and the chimerical archipelago, it follows the poetics of relation, the intermixture, and the Open. (shrink)

This article examines the development of koro’s epistemic status as a paradigm for understanding culture-specific disorders in modern psychiatry. Koro entered the DSM-IV as a culture-bound syndrome in 1994, and it refers to a person’s overpowering belief that his (or her) genitalia is retracting and even disappearing. I focus in particular on mental health professionals’ competing views of koro in the 1960s—as an object of psychoanalysis, a Chinese disease, and a condition predisposed by culture. At that critical juncture, transcultural psychiatrists (...) based outside of continental China—namely, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—appropriated ideas from traditional Chinese culture to consolidate the clinical diagnosis of koro as culture-bound. This new global meaning of koro was made possible by a cohort of medical experts who encountered the phenomenon and its sufferers in Sinophone (Chinese-speaking) communities, but placed their contributions within the broader contours of the global reach of Anglophone psychiatric science. (shrink)

The philosophy of language in the Gongsun Longzi 公孫龍子 has been a hot topic since the 20th century, but there is still controversy about what point Gongsun Long 公孫龍 is making. This article reviews representative studies of the philosophy of language in the Gongsun Longzi in Sinophone academia since 2000. Some studies (especially in journal articles) conceive that one or two of the discourses are on the philosophy of language, while the other discourses concern ontology, epistemology, semiotics, or logic. (...) In contrast, certain scholars read the whole book as being about the philosophy of language. The divergence lies in whether the common thread is linguistic meaning or concept, and whether Gongsun Long’s doctrine is unveiled by one or several theories. These differences lead to a wide variation in their interpretation of the key terms and claims in the Gongsun Longzi. It is found that there is no theoretical framework that can perfectly interpret the book without incurring any criticism, and more efforts are needed to elucidate the philosophy of language in the Gongsun Longzi. (shrink)

The use of the character _wang_ 忘 (forgetting) in the _Zhuangzi_ 莊子 has been widely recognized in traditional and contemporary Chinese scholarship, but its meaning remains unclear. This article reviews some notable studies in Sinophone academia concerning the notion of _wang_ in the _Zhuangzi_. The studies, though not necessarily focused on _wang_, shed light on different aspects of the concept, including its relation to self-cultivation, aesthetics, ethics, and ontology. While some scholars see _wang_ as a form of elimination, others (...) stress its relation to other concepts such as _shi_ 適 (fitting). The relation of these two concepts, however, is not yet clear. There are also debates over what makes _wang_ possible, with some linking it to _dao_ 道 and some directing our attention to our daily experience. Despite the limited attention paid to _wang_ to date, the studies reviewed show that it is a crucial aspect of Zhuangzian philosophy and deserves further study. (shrink)

Opening Democracy in Contemporary Confucian Philosophy, David Elstein identifies himself, correctly, to be filling a gap in English-language scholarship. That gap, as the title partly suggests, is a lack of Anglophone accounts of contemporary Sinophone Confucian views of democracy. We have in English a robust discussion of the relationship between Confucianism and democracy, but there is very little connection between that discourse and the same discussion occurring amongst scholars in Chinese. Thus one of the main aims here is to (...) communicate the Sinophone discussion to readers otherwise cut off from it, and to evaluate its arguments.Elstein selects six thinkers from Taiwan and Mainland China for his... (shrink)

In the final decades of the 20th century, the majority of modern Sinophone scholars believed that Confucianism was an outdated and obsolete ideology that was not only unsuitable for the development...

This study aims to provide a glimpse into 17th–century Zhuāngzǐ (莊子; ca. 4th through 3rd century BCE) studies by introducing the works of Hānshān Déqīng (憨山德清; 1546–1623), Wáng Fūzhī (王夫之; 1619–1692), and Lín Yúnmíng (林雲銘; 1628–1697). These works give a sense of the diversity of approaches to Zhuāngzǐ at this time. All three works have received much attention in Sinophone Zhuāngzǐ studies but only limited attention in the Anglosphere. Indeed, this is the first monograph on the Zhuāngzǐ studies of (...) any of these three thinkers in the English language. Thus, the reader, general or specialist, can gain insight into how the work was read in important culturally–relevant contexts. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan’s theorization of the imaginary has been regarded generally as an organic part of the crucial development of psychoanalytic theory in its post-Freudian stage. This article situates the Lacanian imaginary in the context of contemporary discussions of ‘theory after poststructuralism’, arguing that it moves radically beyond the poststructuralist terrains of deconstruction and discourse-analysis, and is able to off er new insights on various studies. Especially, it can help (re)examine some aporias in the field of Sinology. This article devotes its (...) main body to demonstrating that the Lacanian account of the imaginary is powerful in exploring the assumptions and expectations of modern Sinophone intellectual discourse. Deconstructive discourse-analysis alone is insufficient for understanding the underlying forces that have been fundamentally shaping the contours of modern Chinese intellectuality, and attention needs to be paid to the psychological dimension of Chinese thought. With the aim of tracing and interrogating these underlying forces, this article seeks to show how the fervor for discussing the ‘problem of China’ reveals a hidden psychical mechanism. (shrink)