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About
the Faculty
 Haun
Saussy
haun.saussy@yale.edu
Haun Saussy joined the Yale faculty in 2004. He received
his B.A. (Greek and Comparative Literature) from Duke University
and his M.Phil and Ph.D from Yale (Comparative Literature);
between undergraduate and graduate schools, he studied linguistics
and Chinese in Paris.
An
avid cyclist, he discovered that long road trips favor the
memorization of verb paradigms and lyric poetry, which happen
to be two of his main scholarly interests. His first book,
The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford UP,
1993), discussed the tradition of commentary that has grown
up around the early Chinese poetry collection Shi jing
(known in English as the Book of Songs), finding
in that tradition a basis for examining questions of intercultural
hermeneutics, the theory of figural language, and the relation
between literature and philosophy. He helped Kang-i Sun Chang
of Yale's Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
to edit Chinese Women Poets, An Anthology of Poetry and
Criticism from Ancient Times to 1911 (Stanford, 1999).
His most recent book is Great Walls of Discourse and Other
Adventures in Cultural China (Harvard University Asia
Center, 2001), an account of the ways of knowing and describing
specific to China scholarship, Chinese as well as foreign.
With a collective of artists led by Mel Chin, he contributed
to the design of some sixty sculptural installations for the
new public and university library of San Jose, California,
and another art installation exploring the biology of vision,
designed with Robert Dougherty, Pamela Davis and Kalanit Grill-Spector,
is scheduled to go on tour in fall 2004. Articles published
in journals and collections touch on topics such as the imaginary
universal languages of Athanasius Kircher, Chinese musicology,
the great Qing-dynasty novel Honglou meng, the current
situation and theoretical perplexities of comparative literature,
the history of the idea of oral literature, Haitian literature,
health care for the global poor, and contemporary art. He
is currently working on a book about the concept of rhythm
in psychology, linguistics, literature and folklore, and editing
the American Comparative Literature Association's 2004 report
on the state of the discipline.
Personal web site: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~chs34
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