{"title":"Imitation and creation: Bing Xin’s Fanxing (A Maze of Stars) 繁星and Chunshui (Spring Water) 春水","authors":"Xiao-Qiao Liu","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2019.1616660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2019.1616660","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Fanxing (A Maze of Stars) and Chunshui (Spring Water) are two poetry collections of modern Chinese woman writer Bing Xin (1900–1999). Because they stand at the beginning of a new genre, xiaoshi (short poetry), and are commonly regarded as representative works of this genre, people use the epithets “Bing Xin style,” “Fanxing style,” or “Chunshui style” to refer to xiaoshi writing. Nevertheless, viewed from their intimate relationship with Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds, I argue that Fanxing and Chunshui are products of both imitation and creation. Imitation is not plagiarism. Dryden defines imitation as a form of translation, which allows the full play of the translator’s freedom and personality. With writing as translation, Bing Xin creates her poetics of short poetry writing based on her imitation and appropriation of Tagore’s Stray Birds. Imitation provides the authority and inspiration as well as a model for Bing Xin to follow. However, she does not imitate slavishly or translate faithfully in a traditional sense. Rather, while taking influence from Tagore, Bing Xin reverses the patriarchal and Orientalist tendencies of Tagore with her feminist and realistic writing style. In this way, she both aligns herself with the May Fourth writers and also demonstrates her own voice and features.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"45 1","pages":"100 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77269259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fantastic Time as Para-History: Spectrality and Historical Justice in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out","authors":"Mengxing Fu","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1543069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1543069","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Nobel Laureate Mo Yan has long been hailed by Chinese scholars as leading the literary trend of “new historical fiction,” yet in this article I argue that Mo Yan’s fantasy novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out exemplifies a historical consciousness that is essentially postmodern. In this novel, through the fictional construction of a multidimensional fantastic time that encompasses both a lineal passage of time and its cyclical repetition, a postmodernist deconstruction of authoritative historical narrative and a reconstruction of historical justice are realized. Specifically, the repetition of cyclical time creates a spectrality effect, permanently opening up the present to the past, therefore offering historical justice to those injured in the past. The novel belongs to what Linda Hutcheon terms “historiographic metafiction,” yet its poignant social critique offers a conscientious intervention in fictional history construction.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"64 1","pages":"73 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90754334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deviation and Restoration of Mundaneness and Mythological Nature in Chinese Cinema—Evolution of Chinese Directors of Different Generations over the Past Forty Years after the Reform and Opening-up Policy","authors":"Junbing Cao","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1550237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1550237","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Film is mundane both as an art form and as a myth. It is even considered a mundane art with a mythological nature; however, its mundaneness overshadows the mythological aspect. Over forty years after the reform and opening-up policy, the film industry in China has gone through a series of changes from obedience to reflection, inheritance to criticism, as well as rebellion to restoration. In the cycle of cultural representations from gradual recovery to restoration and transformation, and to international fame and diversification, directors of different generations (i.e., the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the New) have been hovering in confusion between mundane life and mythology. They have been moving back and forth from explaining and glorifying mythologies to weakening and challenging them, thus they have been marked with different shades and colors by the transitional age in their repetitive explorations and attempts. The latest generation of directors in mainland China, i.e., the aggressive generation, have ultimately returned to the reality of the coexistence of the mundane and mythical natures, and are trying to break through boundaries and combine various genres. The aggressive generation is likely to indicate the right direction and the inevitable course of future film creation in mainland China.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"60 1","pages":"135 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83771390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sexual ambiguity in Everything I Never Told You","authors":"Yihang Ma","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1550236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1550236","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Everything I Never Told You is the debut novel of the Chinese American writer Celeste Ng. This essay, with a focus on the gender identity of Nath in the novel, intends to trace his sex-role anxiety, the crisis of masculinity, as well as his sexual ambiguity, arguing that the depiction of his sexual ambiguity is related with the author’s own racial identity, which reflects the dilemmas facing Chinese Americans in the United States.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"82 1","pages":"101 - 109"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72703646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Love Cannot Be Forgotten: Women and Nation in Post-Mao Cinema","authors":"Li Hu","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1549010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1549010","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT “Love” is not an unusual topic in Chinese studies, but very few scholars have addressed issues relating to how love has been represented in post-Mao cinema. While most research on Chinese cinema has concentrated mainly on male directors, such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, I focus on films by women directors, who have been largely ignored. Starting in the late 1970s, women directors represented women from a more personal point of view and handled (albeit with discretion) subjects that had been marginalized. These developments attest to the process of untying of individuals from the grand narrative of nationalism and the emerging of gendered consciousness as a byproduct of burgeoning individual consciousness. This paper takes Zhang Nuanxin’s The Drive to Win (Sha’ou, 1981) and Sacrificed Youth (Qingchun ji, 1985) as examples of how gendered personal expression converges with state ideology in post-Mao China.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"87 1","pages":"124 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83791195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Post-sixties Narratives in Contemporary American Cultural Criticism","authors":"Lin Xiang","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1545882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1545882","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As a special type of criticism, post-sixties narratives represent a very important part of contemporary American cultural criticism. These narratives shape the American collective memory and the national mood – the structure of feeling of American society. Russell Jacoby’s post-sixties narrative, from-bohemia-to-academia, is a case in point. It posits Bohemia and Academia as two contrasting historical tropes, spatial tropes as well as political tropes, to represent contemporary American intellectual life. Such a “Bohemian narrative” offers the “against the grain” narrative tension in Jacoby’s post-sixties narrative. Examination of various post-sixties narratives may help us obtain a new perspective on contemporary American cultural criticism and, at the same time, deepen our understanding of contemporary American culture.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"61 1","pages":"110 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74379084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Studies on 20th Century Western and Vietnamese Theories of Literary Criticism","authors":"V. H. Ngo","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1556841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1556841","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The modernization of Vietnamese culture and arts cannot be separated from the exposure, exchange, and learning from modern Western schools of theories. The relationship of Western-Vietnamese theories of literary criticism started quite early and have made enormous contributions to Vietnamese culture and arts. In this article, the researcher conducted a series of surveys on two main issues: the relationship between Western and Vietnamese theories of literary criticism as well as the reception and application of modern Western theories in Vietnam in the 20th century; thence, the researcher sketches the overall picture of the reception of literary theories in Vietnam over a century, and also analyzes its typical characteristics.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"22 1","pages":"151 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76674584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Containment of Female Linguistic, Spatial, and Sexual Transgression in Arden of Faversham: A Contemporary Palestinian Reading","authors":"B. Hamamra","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1546474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1546474","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Arden of Faversham (1592) endorses the association between female speech and lasciviousness and dislocates the link between silence and chastity in the figure of Alice. This domestic tragedy shows that the subversion of the patriarchal authority enacted by Alice and her accomplices are contained as an ultimate manifestation of the masculine status quo. Following the critical line of presentism, I argue that Alice’s appropriation of the domestic sphere as a subjective space of murder and adultery undermines the Palestinian representation of the house as a nurturing place of order and harmony and complicates the Palestinian, nationalist discourse that figures out the domestic sphere as a sacred nationhood. In both the fictional world of Arden and contemporary Palestine, gossip renders the household subject to the gaze, tongue, and judgment of the public. The containment of Alice’s transgression eclipses the possibility of a feminist emancipation from patriarchal authority in contemporary Palestine.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"66 1","pages":"100 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76316151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Mission of Research on Globalization and Comparative Literature","authors":"Liu Weifang","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1482684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1482684","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT We are living in an era of globalization with constant changes. Globalization has profoundly transformed human life, modes of production and ways of thinking. To obtain a win-win situation and harmonious, common prosperity result, we should actively meet the challenge of globalization, champion cultural diversity, enhance the effective communication between different cultures and civilizations, engage in dialogue on an equal footing, and create an inclusive and friendly atmosphere. Comparative literature study, which has a mission to facilitate communication, dialogue and understanding between culture and literature in eastern and western countries, is supposed to perform an irreplaceable function as a unique bridge. In the age of globalization, China’s comparative literature studies, focusing on cross-culture heterogeneity and complimentary dialogue, take on heavy responsibilities. In terms of culture and academic research, the studies aim to carry out the principle of on-an-equal-footing dialogue and publicize the positive energy of social value.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"17 1","pages":"38 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82861461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Hindu World of R. K. Narayan’s MR. Sampath","authors":"John Rothfork","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1482678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1482678","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT R. K. Narayan’s novel illustrates how a man matures to abandon adolescent colonial dreams by recovering a Hindu outlook and values. The 1949 novel focuses most on views associated with asrama-dharma or developmental expectations associated with four stages of life: childhood, householder, retiree, and sanyasi (ascetic). In the comic development of Sunrise Pictures, the novel illustrates how Hinduism views life stages as comparable to dramatic roles or performances for the purpose of achieving aesthetic and spiritual insight. In the end, Srinivas and Sampath reverse roles. Sampath, a mentor in the beginning, wanders away from his family as an outcast, while Srinivas succeeds in developing satisfying positions in his family and in society.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"91 1","pages":"24 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91045563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}