ABSTRACT
The Inauthentic N ative A couple of years ago, I was serving on a faculty search committee at the University of Minnesota. The search was for a specialist in Chinese language and literature. A candidate from the People’s Republic of China gave a talk that discussed why we still enjoy reading the eighteenth-century classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber. The talk was a theoretical demonstration of how no par ticular interpretation of this book could exhaust the possibilities of reading. During the search committee’s discussion of the various candidates afterwards, one faculty member, an American Marxist, voiced his disparaging view of this particular candidate in the following way: T he talk was not about why we still enjoy reading The Dream o f the Red Chamber. It was about why she enjoys reading it. She does because she likes capitalism!’
