From World Literature to World Poetics: Wang Ning's Scholarship of Literature Studies

As one of the most important and productive humanities scholars in contemporary China, Wang Ning has been consistently engaged with and widely read by international academia. This paper attempts to examine Wang's scholarship with regard to three dimensions: Chinese literature as world literature, China-Western dialogue on and reconstruction of literary theory, and world poetics and cosmopolitanism. With reference to Isaiah Berlin's and Stephen Jay Gould's elaboration on the hedgehog and the fox, it argues that Wang not only works on a wide range of different fields including psychanalysis, postmodernism, postcolonialism, globalization, translation, literary theory, world literature and comparative literature, but he is also deep in each of those cutting-edge issues. Just like his long-time pursuit of bridging China-Western literary studies and his challenges to Eurocentrism and American-centeredness, Wang, in a sense, goes beyond hedgehog-fox divide and is well- accomplished in all and each of the scholarly areas that attracts his interest.