Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book that emerged from his dissertation, Levenson addressed a problem that became one of the main intellectual themes of his subsequent work. The book, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China, examined the life and though of Liang (1873-1929) as a lens through which to view "what his milieu expected of him and could offer him." In his role as intellectual historian, Levenson viewed himself as far more than a recorder of Liang's stated thoughts...
...history and value remain central themes. The first volume of the trilogy picks up where Liang Ch'i-ch'ao left off, taking "the problem of intellectual continuity," the persistence of ideas in changing contexts in space and time, to a society-wide level. No longer tied to the life of a single man, Levenson dispensed with conventions of narrative history, choosing instead to write three books as a web, jumping centuries and cultures to find the comparisons that would treat the same theme from a myriad of settings. From treating crises of intellectuals in an intellectual system...
Levenson's own experience as a Jew was crucial to his life and work. In the introduction of what was to have been his retirement book on Judaism, Levenson proudly reaffirmed his commitment to a Judaism with links to the past that McDonald believed cut him off from the present. To be a Jew in America was for Levenson a choice of standards from which to view not only his own time and culture but any other--"To choose well in life is nothing less than to choose life itself...
...Levenson's conscious choice of life as a Jew was essential to his ability to analyze any other choice. Other histories, other problems became important not because they all blended into one pseudo-historical stew, but because the people living them faced comparable, not identical, choices...
...China really on the beach now, out of range of the cosmopolitan tide? What do they signify, those few Chinese devotees of the Western stage? The Cultural Revolution snuffed them out, after their short and lonely life....But in their insignificance, their restriction to the periphery of the Chinese world, is their significance. The loneliness of these dramatists in China is like China's in the world at large, a China sitting solitary, her ties back to the Chinese past attenuated, her bridges across to the alien present barred...The provincialism of the culture of the Cultural Revolution...