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.

Introduction : Modernism and the body as afterimage -- The eye's mind : self-detection in James's The sacred fount and Nabokov's The eye -- Two mirrors facing : Freud, Blanchot, and the logic of invisibility -- From "Spyglass" to "Horizon" : tracking the anthropological gaze in Zora Neale Hurston -- One-eyed jacks and three-eyed monsters : visualizing embodiment in Ralph Ellison's Invisible man -- Spectacles of violence, stages of art : Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf's dialectic -- Modernist seductions : materializing mass culture in Nathanael West's The day of the locust -- Postscript : From "Our glass lake" : photo/graphic memory in Nabokov's Lolita.

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'.