In this remarkably stimulating and erudite series of essays, Eugene Chen Eoyang explores many of the underlying paradigms and presumptions in world literature, highlighting issues of cultural interchange and cultural hegemony. Translation is seen in this perspective as a central rather than a peripheral factor in understanding the meanings of literary works. Taking concrete examples from Chinese literature, Eoyang illuminates not only the semantic collisions that underlie the complexities of translation, but also the cultural identities reflected in language and values. The title alludes to a passage from Emerson, reminding us that the object on view is not only the vision we see but is also the organ through which that vision is apprehended. The confrontation with a radical "other" - which is, for many Westerners, what Chinese literature represents - is thus both a discovery and a self-discovery. Part of the book's originality is that it identifies a new audience - one that is incipiently bicultural, or knowledgeable about what has been called "East" as well as what has been called "West." Readers with an interest in the theory and practice of translation will find this an inspiring and indispensable work, one that prepares the way for a comparative poetics that recognizes the intense subjectivities in every culture and at the same time establishes a basis for a comparison that tries to transcend, even as it acknowledges, provincialities.

The Eye's Mind significantly alters our understanding of modernist literature by showing how changing visual discourses, techniques, and technologies affected the novels of that period. In readings that bring philosophies of vision into dialogue with photography and film as well as the methods of observation used by the social sciences, Karen Jacobs identifies distinctly modernist kinds of observers and visual relationships. This important reconception of modernism draws upon American, British, and French literary and extra-literary materials from the period 1900-1955. These texts share a sense of crisis about vision's capacity for violence and its inability to deliver reliable knowledge. Jacobs looks closely at the ways in which historical understandings of race and gender inflected visual relations in the modernist novel. She shows how modernist writers, increasingly aware of the body behind the neutral lens of the observer, used diverse strategies to displace embodiment onto those "others" historically perceived as cultural bodies in order to reimagine for themselves or their characters a "purified" gaze. The Eye's Mind addresses works by such high modernists as Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and (more distantly) Ralph Ellison and Maurice Blanchot, as well as those by Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nathanael West which have been tentatively placed in the modernist canon although they forgo the full-blown experimental techniques often seen as synonymous with literary modernism. Jacobs reframes fundamental debates about modernist aesthetic practices by demonstrating how much those practices are indebted to the changing visual cultures of the twentieth century.

Are you struggling to find meaning in your life? Then you are a victim of the Mandarin Effect. This is one of the most sinister features of the modern world, and is being highlighted here for the first time. The force that most contributes to the crisis of meaning is the last one you would expect. Who are the Mandarins and how are they ruining the world? What can be done about them? Who are the small group that can combat the Mandarins, and why have they been airbrushed out of history, as if they never existed? Come inside and read the extraordinary story of a hidden war that is shaping the destiny of the human race. Humanity is currently losing. But, thanks to one group, hope is not yet extinguished.

Eric Hoffman has translated Emerson's "Journals" into a new language, distilling the originative matrix-the master's discursive prose-into two suites of lyric poems. This is translation as critique and renewal, a classic modernist project. Hoffman's poems are like a palimpsest or lithography stone on which traces of a previous drawing have survived. We are witnesses to the presence of a negotiation, the negotiation of a presence. "The Transparent Eye" is the latest manifestation of Hoffman's restless and manifold creativity, a creativity Emerson himself would have saluted. He would not have been counting the spoons. Anthony Rudolf, author of "Zigzag" and "Silent Conversations"

Let us revive the true sense of fine arts: enchantment! In the conceptualised, commercialised, artificial approach to fine arts, we forgot its authentic experiential sense. It lies at the imaginative heart of all arts there to be retrieved by the creative recipient as the very 'truth of it all'.