Existence t4

Il existe un déficit d'informations sur la culture chinoise ancienne et contemporaine dans les sciences humaines françaises, trop exclusivement orientées vers d'autres espaces étrangers. Ou plutôt les perspectives chinoises, dont la connaissance est réservée aux seuls sinologues, viennent trop rarement féconder l'ensemble des sciences humaines. Le recueil se veut donc très caractéristique d'une situation où les sciences humaines en Chine, tout en restant très conscientes d'une spécificité des traditions nationales dans la longue durée, ne sont pas moins soucieuses de les situer dans des dynamiques de transferts et d'échanges avec d'autres régions du monde, ici essentiellement la France et l'Europe. Ces échanges ont donné lieu à une série de conférences à l'Ecole normale supérieure. Michel Espagne est Directeur de recherche, CNRS/Ecole normale supérieure de Paris

Il parait qu'il y a des gens qui font exprès parfois de ne rien faire... On appelle ça la "méditation". Mais est-ce que c'est possible de ne RIEN faire ? Et puis ça veut dire quoi ne rien faire ? Que se passe-t-il dans notre corps quand on ne fait rien ... Ne Rien Faire est un manuel d'introduction à la méditation zen, pour les enfants et pour les adultes dont ils doivent s'occuper.

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula--and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart. Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him. (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet.) Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent--until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So, year after year Lin asks his wife for his freedom, and year after year he returns from the provincial courthouse: still married, still unable to consummate his relationship with Manna. Nothing feeds love like obstacles placed in its way--right? But Jin's novel answers the question of what might have happened to Romeo and Juliet had their romance been stretched out for several decades. In the initial confusion of his chaste love affair, Lin longs for the peace and quiet of his "old rut." Then killing time becomes its own kind of rut, and in the end, he is forced to conclude that he "waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting."There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters"hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna is especially ideological, and the tumultuous events occurring around them go mostly unnoticed. They meet during a forced military march, and have their first tender moment during an opera about a naval battle. (While the audience shouts,"Down with Japanese Imperialism!"the couple holds hands and gazes dreamily into each other's eyes.) When Lin is in Goose Village one summer, a mutual acquaintance rapes Manna; years later, the rapist appears on a TV report titled"To Get Rich Is Glorious,"after having made thousands in construction. Jin resists hammering ideological ironies like these home, but totalitarianism's effects on Lin are clear: Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others" opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace. Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army, and in fact left his native country for the U.S. only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence and power is truly remarkable--but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-year love affair loom as urgent as political terror or war, while history-changing events gain the immediacy of a domestic dilemma. Gracefully phrased, impeccably paced, Waiting is the kind of realist novel you thought was no longer being written. --Mary Park