Ming Dong Gu's volume addresses questions of literary interpretation in a comparative frame, tracing connections between discussions of reading and writing in traditional Chinese sources to the insights of nineteenth- and twentieth-century hermeneutic theorists from the modern West. Gu argues that traditional Chinese reflections on language and literature already contain many of the fundamental elements of recent Western hermeneutics, albeit evolving from somewhat different sets of concerns. Focusing his volume on the idea of literary openness—here founded on Hans-Georg Gadamer's definition of hermeneutic space and recalling Umberto Eco's 1962 Opera aperata—Gu advances a series of arguments, maintaining that awareness of openness in literary works existed in the earliest Chinese debates on language and that both China and the West have traveled a similar path from exegetic closure to interpretive openness.
Gu establishes connections between traditional Chinese and recent Western interpretive methods through eight chapters organized into four parts, each...
