Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Elements of Academic Style (2014), On Literary Worlds (2012), The Hypothetical Mandarin (2009), and Chinese Dreams (2004), and editor of a book series, Global Asias, with Oxford University Press.
Eric Hayot
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Writing on Public Books
Of Clouds and Clocks: The Fiction of David Mitchell
All fiction plays with the tension between freedom and necessity—that is part of what it means to be fiction—but David Mitchell’s fiction plays with it more ostentatiously than most. To what degree do we act of our own volition, to what degree are we just characters in someone else’s story? That is one of the […]
China, Middlebrow to Highbrow
Fiction has more than one way of distancing itself from the real. In most cases this distance serves as a prelude to a future homecoming. The story, like some interstellar traveler, flings itself around the gravity well of a larger and more distant planetary object (the fictional) in order to assure the speed and accuracy […]
