A Brief Foreword：A Brief for Moving Forward

What is the task of Comparative Literature today? What is its object? Any new journal of Comparative Literature must pose this question.There was a time when would have answered the object of Comparative Literature was“the text.”It was an object that seemed so solid.It had weight.It had mass.It had meaning.That meaning，however，could be hard to decipher，and so we developed methods of interpretation.How do we know what a text means? Why do some texts mean different things to different people? How do we arbitrate those conflicts? What constitutes validity in interpretation? Literary theory and textual hermeneutics finds their origins in these questions.

But what about texts that keep generating new meanings? Are they a singular object? How do we account for those“classics”that every new generation makes their own? Do they reveal some universal essence of the literary? Do they tell us something essential about what it means to be human? Do they reveal the fundamentally socially constructed nature of meaning as each new group makes Homer，Confucius，the Book of Odes，or Shakespeare their own?

The task of Comparative Literature has been all these things over the last hundred years and in the process the once solid and reliable text has become ever more evanescent.The object itself may be solid—a book，a scroll，an inscription，an oracle bone，a film，an installation，a painting，a hypertext.You can point to it on a shelf，hold it in your hands，navigate to it on the web，but what it isqua thing，qua object seems ever less solid even as the“object”produces ever more meanings.Separating the object from the context of its interpretation，both at the moment of its creation and at that of its reception，becomes increasingly problematic.In many ways，we have ceased to interpret texts in the classical sense and come to study them as moments or constellations within systems of meaning：within languages，genres，conventions，ideologies，superstructures，national traditions，ecologies of literature，and the ever recurring but impossible to define notion of“world literature.”

In this context，the urgency of the comparative enterprise has becomes more pressing than ever.The effort to understand texts in isolation appears increasingly futile.The very idea of the literary，we discover，is constructed at the intersection of multiple horizons of meaning and only a comparative approach can even begin to do this multiplicity justice，even as this multiplicity in its essential heterogeneity is shown to be the condition of possibility of meaning itself.

The Sino-American Journal of Comparative Literature is launched，then，in the spirit of Comparative Literature as this open field of inquiry.It is structured to always be between languages，between cultures，and between texts.The editors of the journal believe that a comparative approach is not just one possibility among others but that it is a methodological necessity.

The dialogue we launch with this journal will be open-ended and at times cacophonous.Our writers will be addressing each other and our respective objects from often-incommensurable points of view.We relish this.We do not believe that this incommensurability，this inability to reduce our voices and objects to single master narrative or to a single origin is a flaw or a contradiction.Rather we believe this plurality is the very possibility of literary study itself.We invite submissions on all comparative topics from all cor-ners.But we especially invite those submissions that bring together our diverse traditions and that produce new dialogic spaces，new possibilities of meaning.

Paul Allen Miller，Chief Editor

University of South Carolina

01，Mar.2015