Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.4, 2021

 

Ontography and “Yi Wu Guan Wu”

(Abstract)

 

Tang Weisheng

 

Over the past 20 years, Speculative Realism and its subset Object-Oriented Ontology rising in the Western academia have become the new engine for the “material turn”, but “material cultural studies” remains the dominant paradigm in China, and being writing, or ontography, has largely been ignored. The reality of things that exists outside the “correlationist” thought can be approached by four strategies, i.e., mathematical formula, listing, allusion, and agency-attribution. Ontography can be employed in service of a great variety of writing effects and rhetorical purposes. The reality of things has also been thought of in Chinese culture, and “Yi Wu Guan Wu” (observing things from the perspective of things) may be regarded as a Chinese solution to the issue of ontography. A comparison between Western notion of “ontography” and Chinese notion of “Yi Wu Guan Wu” will deepen our understanding of both.