Abstract

The ‘Scope and Concerns’ section of the call for participation in this conference on books stated that ‘Whether by measure of the East or the West, the book is an old medium of representation’. I beg to disagree. From the measure of the paradigm of theory-as-practice, I see Chinese language books as re-presenting “accounts of connected events”‘ The use of the Chinese scripts or characters re-presents those connected events. They do not represent, nor depict, nor typify them. Alphabet-based languages like the English language are linguistic representational tools wherein the twenty six letters or symbols are strung together to represent speech sounds. Assembled in the right order, these symbols can generate words orally or in text to convey meaning.