Promise and premise of creativity why comparative literature matters

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminaries -- Why study literature? -- "What's the story??" the relevance of literature to life -- The uses of the useless: comparative literature and the multinational corporation -- Approaches -- Macintosh apples and Mandarin oranges: discourse functions and dysfunctions in literary comparison -- Cuentos chinos ("chinese tales"): the new chinoiserie -- Cultural temptations in translation: François Cheng's francophone Cathay -- The persistence of Cathay: China in world literature -- A shift in cultural tectonics: challenges of geography the emergence of the southern hemisphere -- A cross-cultural perspective on the modern and the postmodern -- Cultural logics: the categoricalness of things vs. the Maodun of events -- A mestizo of the mind: Maodun in the writings of Octavio Paz -- The genial and congenial art of comparison prospects -- The insights of the outsider: the legacy of translation as afterlife -- The globalization of knowledge: comparative literature as interdisciplinary and multilingual discourse -- The glocalization of knowledge: the ends of the world or the edge of heaven -- The undisciplined discipline: comparative literature and creative wandering -- Synergies and synaethesias: an intraworldly comparative literature.