《美国大学课堂里的中国：旅美学者自述》中收录了十几位旅美学者在美国大学课堂上教授和研究中国文学、社会、历史、文化史的切身体验，他们本着独立而批判的立场，为读者提供了一部颇具思想深度的改写出国留学的“成长小说”。 有这样一群人，他们早期接受了基础中国文化教育，后来留学欧美，继而在欧美著名大学从事文化教育和研究工作。他们经历着中西文化的碰撞，但又保持着非凡的清醒，没有迷失自我。一方面倾情于中国文化的博大精深，另一方面致力于吸收西方文化，熟谙两种文化的背景和它们各自的优势。

TThrough a comparative analysis of diverse texts and contexts, this book offers a cultural history of the interplay between the aesthetic and the political in the formation of personal and collective identity that crystallizes into the Chinese aesthetic of the sublime. It describes how various kinds of politics are aestheticized and how aesthetic manifestations are bound up with prevalent ideologies and politics. In this book, politics refers to various projects for fashioning a viable self, a workable personal and collective identity in the crisis-ridden history of modern China. These projects include imagining a political subject adapted to the modern nation-state, mobilizing revolutionary masses as subjects of the Communist state, sustaining a unified self despite the challenges to traditional culture, erecting the sublime figure of the revolutionary hero, and, finally, debunking the grand images of the hero and history in post-Mao culture. Throughout, the author seeks to delineate the ways the political masquerades as aesthetic discourse and aesthetic experience. Covering a wide range of material from fiction, poetry, aesthetics, and political discourse to memoirs, film, and historical documents, the book reconsiders a number of prominent cultural figures, including Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Mao Zedong, Zhu Guangqian, and Li Zehou. It also analyzes such important cultural features and events as Western influences on the formation of modern Chinese aesthetic discourse, modernist writings, Revolutionary Cinema, the Cultural Revolution, and New Wave Fiction. An East-West comparative approach informs the analysis, which engages in dialogue with Kant, Hegel, Freud, Marx, and Walter Benjamin, as well as Terry Eagleton and other contemporary critics. The author's interdisciplinary method, which emphasizes the interaction among text, context, and the psyche, both presents new materials and illuminates familiar texts and phenomena from the perspective of the political-aesthetic nexus.

质疑令球现代性应阐发潜藏的记忆，警觉别样的历史轨迹和背景，历史想象封冻于历史终结论。本书论证，虽然历史与记忆面临危机，或被组装成古雅的消费景观，但它仍然是强有力的抗拒资源。历史意识在批判僵化的历史叙述，潜心寻求文化记忆，发扬未完成的可能，展望出中国现代性的别样风景线。

作者现任美国斯坦福大学东亚系教授。《历史的崇高形象——二十世纪中国的美学与政治》是其学术代表作。该书以“崇高”为切入点，沿中西比较路径，游刃于美学、哲学、文学、历史各“学”之间，探讨了中国二十世纪赖以塑造个人形象的种种美学手段，描述了美学与政治的纠葛，分析了关于崇高的丰盈的中国美学。 “海外中国现代文学研究译丛”，是一套汇集海外顶尖学者在中国现代文学研究领域代表作的学术丛书，本书则是斯坦福大学东亚系教授王斑最重要学术著作。王斑认为，美学和政治的纠葛，在中国现代历史上看，存在积极、消极的两方面。他并非崇高美学的热衷者，可他已领会过足够多的“崇高”感，回忆起来时常会感到尴尬，对于这种心理转变的勇敢追问，在《历史的崇高形象》中显得尤为可贵。书中还涉及了广泛的话题，如《红楼梦》、毛泽东诗词、弗洛伊德、张爱玲、思想解放等等，王斑都以优美雅致的文笔对其加以条理清晰的论述，令人耳目一新。