Category Archives: Vol. 2 No. 1

Faculty Introduction for “Making It New: Ezra Pound’s ‘Luminous’ Mythmaking of China”

Faculty Introductions, Vol. 2 No. 1

Read “Making It New: Ezra Pound’s ‘Luminous’ Mythmaking of China”.

I congratulate Bai Xiao on the inclusion of her essay “Making It New: Ezra Pound’s ‘Luminous’ Mythmaking of China” for publication in our writing journal. She wrote this essay for the Perspectives on the Humanities course titled “Sino-Western Literary Exchanges” that I taught in the Fall of 2016. It is an extremely ambitious project, stretching over Pound’s entire career as a poet-translator, from his initial encounter with the Fenollosa manuscripts to his tragic years after World War II, and covering a stunning array of texts and ideas, from Cathay through the Da xue or, as Pound rendered it, The Great Digest to the Cantos, from the nature of the Chinese language through the social and economic problems in the interwar period to the moral and political teachings of Confucius. In ranging back and forth among this plethora of materials, the essay deserves credit for not losing sight of its argument: namely, Pound’s China is an imaginary construct invented as a cure for the crises facing the Western world in his day. I recommend the essay for its many insights, its exuberant ambition, and its value as a case study of cultural exchange.

—Chen Lin, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Faculty Introduction for “Cultural Beings in Context: Reassessing the Individual Locus of Cosmopolitanism”

Faculty Introductions, Vol. 2 No. 1

Read “Cultural Beings in Context: Reassessing the Individual Locus of Cosmopolitanism”.

Ma Haitian wrote this essay for our Writing as Inquiry (Writing II) course. In this second major assignment, students were asked to perform a considered analysis of a central text, to add a second text to this analysis, and then to situate their own claims in relationship to these two texts. The assignment required students to consider deeply the arguments, assumptions, and methods of other scholars, and to place their own ideas among those given to them by the texts’ authors.

In this essay, Haitian has created a rich and insightful critique of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s conception of the individual. In building her own argument, Haitian deftly uses each source, selecting textual evidence to great effect. This essay models the excellent academic argumentation that arises from thorough close reading and careful attunement to the implications of another author’s claims.

—Jennifer Tomscha, Associate Director of and Lecturer in the Writing Program

Letter from the Editors | Vol. 2

Letter from the Editors, Vol. 2 No. 1

Dear Reader,

We are excited to bring you this second volume of The Hundred River Review, NYU Shanghai’s journal of excellent student writing. Our university calls students to “Make the World Your Major,” to seek out encounters with those around us and with the city in which we live. Of course, all writing is an encounter of author and text, of writer and idea; all encounters are rife with the negotiation of language, culture, power, and place. Reading the five essays in this year’s journal, we see our students creating their own encounters through engagement with important texts and complicated questions. The contents of these pages are a testament to students’ curiosity, to their pursuit of intellectual encounters.

Ma Haitian’s essay questions the presumption that individual encounters are the engine that drives cosmopolitanism. Madison E. Pelletier dives deep into the ethically fraught encounters between Western medical researchers and participants in placebo trials in the Global South. Cindy Wang examines the world of the live house, where interaction between musicians and their fans shape China’s image on the global stage. Bai Xiao turns her analytical eye to Ezra Pound’s long and passionate engagement with China, especially with the philosophy of Confucius. Finally, Claire Ren, through the lens of Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon’s documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, considers how one encounter between a government and its people has become a source of political othering.

We believe that the work showcased here is a model of what first-year and sophomore students can accomplish in the Writing as Inquiry (I & II) and Perspectives on the Humanities core courses. We hope you that you find these essays enlightening and that they enrich your own writing and learning.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Tomscha and Sophia Gant

The Hundred River Review Editorial Board