You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.36 AVERAGE
3.36 AVERAGE
Condescending, disorganised, poorly told, insipid and ahistorical. This is the work of a mediocre pseudo-intellectual.
I want to elaborate a little here, lest ppl think I'm some sort of w0ketard with an axe to grind against a writer in the late colonial milieu. Let me be clear that even measured against those standards, this is a lazy, uninspired piece of trash writing.
The Chinese stories rendered here are organised haphazardly, and told in a bland, overly-descriptive manner that make the myths appear almost as bland and as overly-descriptive as Werner himself.
I lay the quality of these stories entirely on the author himself. As a Chinese person I grew up with far livelier renderings of these stories in Chinese media, so it is certainly not an issue of the Chinese themselves, as Werner occasionally likes to imply in this text.
It isn't strictly a translational issue either. David Kherdian's entertaining English translation of Monkey is far superior to the vacuous, anaemic rendering of Wukong's exploits in this text. English writers can, and do, translate Chinese stories well --but perhaps only if they don't come at the task with the snide condescension Werner keeps applying in this book.
I dont know, is he trying to be scholarly for his time here, by trying to put on some sort of anthropological lens? Because the attempt is clumsy, cack-handed and ahistorical. And other writers "of his time" accord their subjects and subject matter with far greater respect. Werner likes to lump the long span of Chinese history into a indistinguishable mass, then make lazy, sweeping statements about "the Chinese". His frequent, incoherently moralistic asides about this or that story, in this or that character, also do him no favours.
Finally, for all his characterising of the Chinese as cruel, unintellectual and dishonest, Werner is strikingly silent on the British role in the Chinese consumption of opium when he tries early on to attempt a "sociology of the Chinese". Crass sophistry for someone trying to ape such an intellectual act.
Nor is this very Christian man above calling the flood myths of the Chinese a "silly" story. I would have expected less cognitive dissonance from a self-styled representative of ostensibly the most civilised race and genteel religion in the world.
Finally, Werner offers no bibliography, not even a single Chinese source for his collection. Nor even a brief discussion of his methodology. Is this a norm for the period? No, it is not. We are talking early twentieth century, not the Western Dark Ages. This writer wants to speak like a Sinologist scholar but cannot even bothered to reflect that in his actions.
Werner takes the stories of the Chinese, makes sneering asides about them to profit off them, and then cannot even be bothered to repay the intellectual debt. He cannot be bothered to name ONE Chinese person from which he heard or read these stories from. Did these things come to his Great White Brain in a Dream? Or did he somehow Rationalise it through the Raw Power of his His Massive Cranial Dimensions? How can anything so laggardly and insultingly written qualify under the umbrella of "Social Sciences"? What is this appalling, plagiaristic silence, if not cultural imperialism?
To conclude, I would have been willing to excuse this writer's crass, racist ideas if the rest of his scholarship here were more robust, and honest. Sometimes we can't account for how moral standards change over decades.
But there should at least be some logical consistency, academic integrity, and precision to the truth-claims we make. Some clear-eyed honesty if we are going to make such sweeping civilisational claims - though of course maybe if you're making sweeping civilisational claims you're probably not very interested in precision or clear-eyed honesty.
Instead, Werner uses Chinese folklore as a soapbox for his civilisational bigotry, and a mask for his academic dishonesty and his ahistorical, pseudoscientific 'methods'. This is the work of a writer with scholarly pretensions, but with none of the spine and integrity required of an ACTUAL scholar. The biggest myth and legend here is Werner's authority and respectability to speak for the Chinese and their stories.
I want to elaborate a little here, lest ppl think I'm some sort of w0ketard with an axe to grind against a writer in the late colonial milieu. Let me be clear that even measured against those standards, this is a lazy, uninspired piece of trash writing.
The Chinese stories rendered here are organised haphazardly, and told in a bland, overly-descriptive manner that make the myths appear almost as bland and as overly-descriptive as Werner himself.
I lay the quality of these stories entirely on the author himself. As a Chinese person I grew up with far livelier renderings of these stories in Chinese media, so it is certainly not an issue of the Chinese themselves, as Werner occasionally likes to imply in this text.
It isn't strictly a translational issue either. David Kherdian's entertaining English translation of Monkey is far superior to the vacuous, anaemic rendering of Wukong's exploits in this text. English writers can, and do, translate Chinese stories well --but perhaps only if they don't come at the task with the snide condescension Werner keeps applying in this book.
I dont know, is he trying to be scholarly for his time here, by trying to put on some sort of anthropological lens? Because the attempt is clumsy, cack-handed and ahistorical. And other writers "of his time" accord their subjects and subject matter with far greater respect. Werner likes to lump the long span of Chinese history into a indistinguishable mass, then make lazy, sweeping statements about "the Chinese". His frequent, incoherently moralistic asides about this or that story, in this or that character, also do him no favours.
Finally, for all his characterising of the Chinese as cruel, unintellectual and dishonest, Werner is strikingly silent on the British role in the Chinese consumption of opium when he tries early on to attempt a "sociology of the Chinese". Crass sophistry for someone trying to ape such an intellectual act.
Nor is this very Christian man above calling the flood myths of the Chinese a "silly" story. I would have expected less cognitive dissonance from a self-styled representative of ostensibly the most civilised race and genteel religion in the world.
Finally, Werner offers no bibliography, not even a single Chinese source for his collection. Nor even a brief discussion of his methodology. Is this a norm for the period? No, it is not. We are talking early twentieth century, not the Western Dark Ages. This writer wants to speak like a Sinologist scholar but cannot even bothered to reflect that in his actions.
Werner takes the stories of the Chinese, makes sneering asides about them to profit off them, and then cannot even be bothered to repay the intellectual debt. He cannot be bothered to name ONE Chinese person from which he heard or read these stories from. Did these things come to his Great White Brain in a Dream? Or did he somehow Rationalise it through the Raw Power of his His Massive Cranial Dimensions? How can anything so laggardly and insultingly written qualify under the umbrella of "Social Sciences"? What is this appalling, plagiaristic silence, if not cultural imperialism?
To conclude, I would have been willing to excuse this writer's crass, racist ideas if the rest of his scholarship here were more robust, and honest. Sometimes we can't account for how moral standards change over decades.
But there should at least be some logical consistency, academic integrity, and precision to the truth-claims we make. Some clear-eyed honesty if we are going to make such sweeping civilisational claims - though of course maybe if you're making sweeping civilisational claims you're probably not very interested in precision or clear-eyed honesty.
Instead, Werner uses Chinese folklore as a soapbox for his civilisational bigotry, and a mask for his academic dishonesty and his ahistorical, pseudoscientific 'methods'. This is the work of a writer with scholarly pretensions, but with none of the spine and integrity required of an ACTUAL scholar. The biggest myth and legend here is Werner's authority and respectability to speak for the Chinese and their stories.