{"title":"Mulan in China and America: From Premodern to Modern","authors":"Qing Yang","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1482681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1482681","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Mulan legend has traveled from Chinese culture to America undergoing the process of cultural filtration. Compared with Mulan in classical Chinese literature, the system of representations behind Mulan in America has undergone variation. But how and why does it vary? And what is the significance of the variation? This paper is going to analyze the cause of the variation of Mulan by reviewing the changes and development in both China and America from the perspective of the Variation Theory of Comparative Literature. This paper claims that Mulan has developed into a new system of representations via cultural filtering and authors’ reinterpreting when traveling to America. Yet, the cultural codes behind Mulan that have variated do not merely reveal the differences between Chinese and American culture but more importantly the difference between premodern and modern ethics, between ancient China and the modern West.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"249 8 1","pages":"45 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90787109","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":"Tibetan Narrative in Howard Goldblatt’s Translation: From The Dust Settles to Red Poppies","authors":"Huang Li","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1482849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1482849","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Dust Settles, a masterpiece of the famous Tibetan author Alai, has won the influential Mao Dun Literature Award in China. This work of fiction has also attracted overseas scholars and in 2002 even the well-known translators Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin translated this work into English with the title Red Poppies. Rewriting of the title indicated Goldblatt’s domestication translation strategy with the purpose to entertain his readers and to follow American ideology. This translation strategy improved the popularity and circulation of the English version, leaving sufficient room for imagination for the readers. On the other hand, this translation strategy diminished the Tibetan historical narrative, changed ideological discourses such as relationships between Tibetan and Han nationalities and created a gulf between different Tibetan classes and abandoned some Han and Tibetan qualities of the fiction. This interpretation led some readers to overstate the identity anxiety of the Tibetan authors and the conflict between Tibetan and Han culture.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"185 1","pages":"12 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77755220","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 Concept of Literature of the Republic of China in Chinese Modern Literary History Studies: A Speech at Princeton University","authors":"Liu Yi","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1482679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1482679","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the last decade, the most noteworthy phenomenon is the bringing forward of the concept of “literature of the Republic of China” and a series of relevant discussions triggered afterwards in mainland China’s modern literature research. This concept of literary history, like the concept of the twentieth-century Chinese literature advocated in the 1980s, has the goal of literary development according to its own traditional political ideology, and at the same time shows the reflection and review of the separation from the historical context of China’s reality in previous research. Through academic debate and discussion in recent years, the misunderstanding of the concept of “literature of the Republic of China” as a literary criticism method has been further clarified. The concept, showing the unique value of “the Republic of China as a method,” can not only broaden the scope of Chinese modern literature studies, but also form a better atmosphere of the conversation with other current research topics such as “Taiwan literature” and “Chinese literature.”","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"6 1","pages":"60 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81731404","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":"William Shakespeare’s Caliban and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacer: Survival Through the Third Space/Thing","authors":"Ali Emamipour","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2018.1482847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2018.1482847","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Caliban in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the unnamed narrator in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, both dwelling in an underpopulated island for quite some time, bear striking similarities, particularly when seen as two characters who have fallen victim to colonialism. This paper begins by comparing the modern exploitation in Surfacing and traditional colonizing practices in The Tempest. Afterward, it goes on to highlight the role Caliban’s and the Surfacing narrator’s fathers played in making the colonization of their children justified, so to speak. Then, this paper compares the way these two characters undergo transformation. Alongside elaborating on Caliban’s and Atwood’s unnamed narrator’s comparable temperaments, this paper will discuss the way these two characters come to negotiate the hegemony of imperialism. Employing the ideas of Homi Bhabha and Margaret Atwood regarding the third space/thing, this paper, in its conclusion, addresses the measures taken by these two characters to tackle the hegemonic power through compromise.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"251 1","pages":"1 - 11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85947247","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":"Decoding the Translations of Political Terms in the Nineteenth-Century Chinese–English Dictionaries – Lobscheid and his Chinese–English Dictionary","authors":"Wong Tsz","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2017.1387975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2017.1387975","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT German missionary Wilhelm Lobscheid (罗存德, 1822–1893) played a vital role in English–Chinese translations. His English–Chinese Dictionary (英华字典, 1866–1869) was the first comprehensive bilingual dictionary published in Hong Kong with both Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations. Regarding his dictionary as the bridge between two languages, political terms previously nonexisting in the Chinese diction are shaped and shared during China’s crucial political transformation from the Qing Empire to the Republic of China. With selected examples, this paper emphasizes Lobschied’s contribution in sharing political knowledge through his dictionary.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"172 1","pages":"204 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79479619","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":"Franz Kafka and Contemporary Chinese Culture","authors":"Yanbing Zeng, Qiuran Hu","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2017.1387973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2017.1387973","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As a Jewish writer writing in German, who mainly lived in Prague, a European city, Franz Kafka has so deeply affected and shaped China’s contemporary culture in a manner beyond his expectations and imaginations. Besides, the large effect is fantastical to those who love and even are obsessed with Kafka. After all, it is exciting and gratifying. Kafka has an influence upon almost every field, such as literature, film, music, painting, media, touring, catering business, housing, furniture, decoration, wedding photography, women shoes, etc. From “Kafka in China” to “China’s Kafka” everywhere, he has become a pop cultural sign in China today: wherever you go, you would bump into Kafka abruptly.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"47 1","pages":"157 - 167"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84867272","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":"“Nature,” “Homer,” and “Shakespeare”: Revisiting Pope and Wordsworth on How to Write Poetry","authors":"Zhuyu Jiang","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2017.1387393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2017.1387393","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Both Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and William Wordsworth (1770–1850) proposed their own opinions about how to create poetry. As the representative poet of the school of Romanticism, William Wordsworth is supposed to revise and refine Pope’s ideas, who is the representative of the schools of Neoclassicism and who came earlier than Wordsworth. Pope believed that there are rules and traditions in literary classics, and he emphasized the importance of learning about them and applying them in poets’ creation to make the poetry just and conformed. Wordsworth, who came later, preferred the utmost and fluent expression of personal feelings to rigid adherence to rules and traditions. Yet, if we reexamine the two great critics’ ideas about how to make poetry, we will find that both emphasize a synthesis of rules and feelings, for example Pope’s “Nature” and “Homer,” and Wordsworth’s “Nature” and “Shakespeare.” This essay will reexamine critical works of both Pope and Wordsworth to illuminate how critics from different times give similar ideas about the synthesis of rules and feelings in the creation of poetry.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"129 1","pages":"168 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85340079","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":"Reading Undoing Gender in East–West Comparative Literature","authors":"Linn Song","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2017.1387981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2017.1387981","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This review essay revisits Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender by focusing on two issues that relate queer theory to East–West comparative literature: the relationship between the textual and the social in literary criticism and the tension between universality and cultural specificity when applying West-originated theories to non-Western texts. Drawing on Butler’s discussions, it suggests that literary criticism should be treated as a socially embedded political and ethical critique, and queer knowledge production should be situated in local and transnational contexts to displace and decenter the epistemological hegemony of Euro-American queer theory.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"79 1","pages":"246 - 251"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87130317","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":"Magic World in Song of Solomon: A Return to Black Culture","authors":"Ping Du","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2017.1387979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2017.1387979","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Magic realism, originated from Latin America, manifests mainly three artistic principles in Song of Solomon: first, confusing the boundary between reality and fantasy to create a magic world, where man and ghost coexist and co-communicate. Second, employ mythological archetypes to endow reality with fabulous meanings. It helps to show how American black women fight against cultural oppression and keep their cultural heritage and traditional values. Lastly, Song of Solomon also uses some techniques such as allegory and symbolism to convey the themes. A “Solomon’s song” reveals the miserable fate of American black women and their role and function in their men’s journey.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"127 1","pages":"234 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83199489","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":"Evidence of the Hand in Art/Life in Light of the Livre D’Artiste","authors":"Sophia Kidd","doi":"10.1080/25723618.2017.1390842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2017.1390842","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay dwells upon the human hand, on its evidence in pages of Art/Life. ‘Evidence of the Hand’ is a motif in publisher Joe Cardella’s personal artwork, both on and off Art/Life pages. Examining a few key dimensions of this motif, we first discuss the hand’s appearance in all of Volume 1 (1981), as well as in selected instances throughout later issues. Second, we linger on Art/Life’s earliest collages as art’s high-brow ‘aura’ took a hit with printing technology’s first democratic offering to artists. Following a natural progression, we then turn our attention to Art/Life as democratic medium, focusing on an international mail art project. This essay then closes this treatment with a zoom-in on first and last anniversary issues. The only issue ever boxed, the November/December issue of Volume One allowed for an explosion of artistic and material possibilities, leading the transformation of Art/Life from two-dimensional Xerox-based zine to multi-media artist-book collected and archived by the world’s leading academic and art institutions. This development culminated in Art/Life’s 25th Anniversary Issue.","PeriodicalId":34832,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Literature East West","volume":"1138 1","pages":"228 - 233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72683753","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}