Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography.

• Author: Kroll, Paul W.
• Position: Review

Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. By Q. EDWARD WANG. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2000. Pp. 304. $21.95 (paper).

I know of colleagues who give two grades on student papers, one for substance, one for style--as though content and form, idea and expression, are somehow separable entities that do not influence and condition each other. The increasingly poor level of English writing in some disciplines of the humanities during the past quarter of a century suggests that many scholarly presses and journals have likewise adopted a double grading scale and have decided that style, including even correct English usage, is nothing more than mere ornament--nice if it is present, but not a problem serious enough to merit flunking, or even revising, the manuscript if absent. This is becoming a professional embarrassment that should concern us all.

So, what can one say of a book in which one reads the following sentence in the acknowledgments: "Yet it is I who is ultimately responsible for any remaining mistakes" (p. xi)? One winces over the fact that no one caught such an obvious error and one chuckles over the unfortunate context in which it occurs; one might even suspect a sly joke--until, that is, one actually begins reading this book. Alas, one discovers quickly that this is not an isolated slip. Reading Q. Edward Wang's book is the linguistic equivalent of watching a train-wreck, as one sentence after another goes careening off the grammatical rails. I am not talking here of problems owing to opaque jargon or theory-driven flummery, but of elementary matters like agreement of subject and predicate, the proper use of definite and indefinite articles, the function of tenses, the avoidance of dangling participles and ambiguous antecedents, the meaning of apostrophe marks, etc.--a basic facility with the language that should reflect the skills mastere d in a good junior-high or (given the present state of public education) high-school composition class. Surely it is not asking too much that a university press certify at least this level of language competence in the books it offers to the public? Grace and wit may not be required, but simple clarity should be. Expression affects--and effects--thought, unless one pretends that "A" or even "B" content is discernible through "D" form.

If the author happens, as he seems here, not to be a native speaker...