Abstract
Although the classic Chinese novel continues to have an influence on modern writers, as a living art formula and cultural form it would appear that it did not survive beyond the first two decades of 20th century. In this contribution our issue on a comparative (or contrastive) literature, the author returns to matters of contemporary afterlife of the six volumes first-rate select canon of the Classic Chinese fiction as a corpus delicti of a unique case of literariness.
This article relates to author's life-long project which can be simply reduced to triadic question(s): how to read it, how to translate it, and why, maintained by the fixed idea that this canonical corpus (demarcated by the dates of print 1522-1792) presents and re-presents a special contingency and another experience of writing and reading the great narrative form called "novel" here and now.