Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Transnational Film Production And The Tourist Gaze : On Hou Hsiao-Hsien’S Café Lumière And Flight Of The Red Balloon, Shr-Tzung, Elliott Shie

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This article attempts to reexamine the multiple forms of displacement in and of the film to which the new historical era gave rise, and thereby critically engage with the questions of transnational capital flow, global tourism and spectatorship, and textual migration in the case of intertextuality.

Women And Dao In Gao Xingjian’S Works, Jianmei Liu

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Drawing on the existing scholarly studies that have gone beyond the misogynist paradigm, such as those by Mabel Lee, Gilbert Fong, Terry Siu-han Yip, Kwok-kan Tam, and Mary Mazzilli, I intend to explore the connection between the Zen Buddhist comprehension of Dao and the representation of women in Gao Xingjian’s novels and plays. As desire and sexual relationships play a very crucial part in the realm of Zen, the role of women is inevitably bound up with self-awareness and self-reflection, which are enshrined by Gao Xingjian as necessary on the path toward individual enlightenment. According to Gao, even if women’s …

China On The Move : Travel, Exile, And Migration In Chinese Literature And Film Of The 20th Century, Stephen Roddy, Frederik H. Green, Wei Menkus

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

During no previous century in China’s long history has society experienced more profound and far-reaching changes than during that nation’s long twentieth century. The contact with Western modernity and institutional change during the late Qing dynasty, the end of dynastic rule and the birth of the Republic, the Pacific War and the Civil War, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan’s gradual democratization and finally the era of opening and reform in China under Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平 (1904−97) and the ensuing economic rise are only some of the key historical events that have profoundly transformed Chinese society …

Frankenstein’S Migratory Subject : Under The Dome And Formosa Vs. Formosa, Chia-Ju Chang

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Bamboo Branches Out West : Zhuzhici In Xinjiang, Stephen Roddy

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

A New Incarnation : Prism : Theory And Modern Chinese Literature, Zongqi Cai

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

After twenty-two years of publishing since 1997, Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese (JMLC) will assume a new incarnation in 2019: Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, a biannual peer-reviewed journal published by Duke University Press for Lingnan University of Hong Kong. This journal is jointly sponsored by the Centre for Humanities Research and the Chinese Department of Lingnan University and the Forum on Chinese Poetic Culture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The Contradictions Of Exile : Escape, Testimony, And Ethics In Gao Xingjian’S One Man’S Bible, Sebastian Veg

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

The present essay proposes to focus more closely on One Man’s Bible as encapsulating some of the tensions and contradictions of exile as a theme in Gao’s work and worldview.

The Torment Of Exile And The Aesthetics Of Nostalgia : Transnational Chinese Neo-Romanticism In Xu Xu’S Post-War Fiction, Frederik H. Green

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Physical exile certainly was a painful reality for Xu Xu. Restorative nostalgia might to some extent have informed his literary activity in those years. However, nostalgia in Xu Xu’s postwar fiction, I will argue in this paper, constitutes above all the expression of a quest for a purely aesthetic utopia that had already begun to take shape in his pre-war oeuvre and that came to full fruition in his post-war fiction. By analyzing a number of Xu Xu’s novellas from Hong Kong, such as Bird Talk, The Other Shore 彼岸 (1951), and The All-Souls Tree 百靈樹 (1954), I will show …

Lost At Home : Jia Zhangke’S Journey Toward Modernity, Wei Menkus

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

In this essay, I take a close look at three of Jia’s films that have prominently engaged the topic of home in relation to place, identity, and nation: Still Life 三峽好人 (2006), 24 City 24城記 (2008), and A Touch of Sin 天註定 (2013). Set at the turn of the twenty-first century, these films employ various modes of representation concerning the reality of space. Still Life, a quiet and contemplative cinematic essay on change and obsolescence, tracks two strangers’ separate journeys to the Three Gorges city of Fengjie as they look for their missing spouses in the disappearing land. 24 City …

The Diaspora And The Nation : A Cultural Poetics Of Re-Membering In Lai Shengchuan’S Taiwan Trilogy, Jon Eugene Von Kowallis

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Gender Representations In Adaptations Of Foreign Literature In The Republican Period, Liyan Qin

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Chinese film The Heroine in the Besieged City 孤城烈女 (Gucheng lienü, 1936) is based on 19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant’s (1850−93) story “Boule de Soif.” The Chinese version of Boule de Soif, like her French counterpart, is caught in a moral dilemma: should she surrender her body to a bad guy to save her fellow citizens? Both women choose to sacrifice themselves for others. However, the outcome and worthiness of the sacrifice in the Chinese film are just the opposite to those in the French literary source. Maupassant makes the girl’s sacrifice pointless and worthless by portraying the beneficiaries …

Too Intimate To Speak : Regional Cinemas And Literatures, Victor Fan

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

In this essay, I look back at a moment in Chinese literature and cinema, the 1930s and 1940s, when writers, filmmakers, and critics were driven by a series of political crises to conceptualize the relationship between “mother language” and “national language” from a very different perspective than Song’s. I do so by scrutinizing film and literary criticisms from this period. A national language, literature, and cinema are not static, unified, and internally coherent entities that naturally subsume their regional counterparts under them. While Putonghua 普通話 (literally, common language) required—and still requires—an ongoing process of putong hua 普通化 (communalization), regional topolects, …

Old Tales, Untold : Lu Xun Against World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

World literature has smiled on Lu Xun 魯迅. He stands, if not as the foremost, then as a major representative of modern Chinese literature in anthologies. Though anthologies are not the ultimate arbiters of literary worldliness, they are influential discursive sites because of their accessibility and classroom utility. To wit, he is a common figure on university syllabi in world literature surveys. Professionally, scholarship on Lu Xun’s work reaches far beyond disciplinary Chinese studies. His works have been translated and retranslated many times in less than a century. All this is perhaps fitting considering his extraordinary services rendered to world …

Chinese Poetry And Translation : Moving The Goalposts, Maghiel Van Crevel

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Poetry + translation will trigger claims the size of office blocks, all the way from Robert Frost (censored here) to Eliot Weinberger (Poetry is that which is worth translating). Add Chinese to the mix, and things get even better.

The translation of poetry is fun to bounce around in conversation, but winds up frequently in dead-end discourse full of zombie notions of equivalence, faithfulness, servitude, and so on— not to mention the specter of the genre’s “inherent untranslatability.” In June 2017, a dozen scholars and translators held a workshop at Lingnan University, assuming primariness and agency for translation instead. Most …

Strong And Weak Interpretations In Translating Chinese Poetry, Lucas Klein

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese poetry the same as or different from translating modern Chinese poetry? I have earlier argued that modern Chinese poetry is in some ways a translation of premodern Chinese poetics through the filter of international poetics—but if this is the case, then should translation of classical and modern poetry into English be more similar than they are? Looking at Lydia Liu’s notion of the “supersign” alongside my experiences translating contemporary poets Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan as well as Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, I discuss what …

The Migrant Voice : The Politics Of Writing Home Between The Sinophone And Anglophone Worlds, Kenny K. K. Ng

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This paper addresses the politics of language, identity, and diasporic Chinese writing in old and emerging Chinese migrant literature. I opt for the idea of a “migrant subject” as brought up by Ha Jin to underscore a diverse verbal strategy and mobile literary creativity: that of the migrant writer who initiates linguistic and literary perversions to actively intervene in the cultural politics of both the host country and the motherland. The article proceeds to recuperate the diasporic narratives of Sinophone authors Bai Xianyong and Nie Hualing as two earlier examples of migrant writers before Ha, which exemplified the Cold War …

The Transculturation Of American Poetry In China, 1917-1937, Chris Song

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This paper offers a critical overview of the reception of American poetry in China from 1917 to 1937. Drawing on Maria Tymoczko’s theory of transculturation, it shows how in order to meet local poetic and ideological demands, America’s New Poetry Movement, Left poetry, and Black poetry were “performed” in (relay) translations by Chinese authors. Understudied to date, these texts reveal a fascinating literary and political process in which American poetry and Chinese poetry were mutually shaped through translation.

The Rise And Fall (And Rise Again) Of Vernacular Happiness, Haiyan Lee

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This article delineates the vicissitudes of vernacular happiness in China across the crucial transitions of the early 20^th century. Traditionally, vernacular happiness was symbolized by a triune of gods, fu-lu-shou, standing for progeny, wealth, and longevity. Happiness was thus a matter of good fortune, ardently prayed for rather than programmatically pursued. The ruling elite patronized this folk cult of happiness through a discourse of virtue and benevolence, but were themselves inclined to pursue more transcendent goals (Dao, de) and refined pleasures (lequ).

To the May Fourth generation, the traditional social order was founded …

Homeless In The World : War, Narrative, And Historical Consciousness In Eileen Chang, György Lukács, And Lev Tolstoy, Roy Bing Chan

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This paper explores how Lev Tolstoy’s work was discussed by both Marxist philosopher György Lukács and Chinese writer Eileen Chang during the global crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War. According to Lukács, Tolstoy’s fiction embodied the quintessence of realist narrative’s ability to capture the mass experience of history. For Chang, defending herself against charges of being a trivial and uncommitted pulp writer, Tolstoy’s work exemplified the value of a narrative process marked by the very serendipity and contingency mirrored in reality. All three writers struggled with a conception of a unified world both as a utopian ideal, …

Translating Migrant Worker Poetry : Whose Voices Get Heard And How?, Eleanor Goodman

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Translation involves the art of knowing when to get out of the way—and of knowing when to get in the way. Chinese migrant worker poetry brings this issue to the fore with unusual urgency, as its language often breaks the rules for being “poetic” or “elegant.” But what is being conveyed by the language these poets employ, and what is lost if the translator yields to the temptation to smooth out the rough edges? And how does the act of translating and anthologizing these poets affect the ways in which they are read?

Contributors

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Can We Say An Ear Of Cabbage : On Translating Wordplay In Xi Xi’S Poetry, Jennifer Feeley

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This article reflects on the translation of wordplay in the poetry of Hong Kong author Xi Xi. Xi Xi is a highly imaginative poet: much of her poetry hinges upon specificities of the Chinese language, and one might well ask if this makes her work “untranslatable.” This article identifies various techniques for translating Xi Xi’s wordplay, detailing how I mine the potential of English for ways to recreate Xi Xi’s puns, puzzles, and playful subversion of language in a new linguistic and cultural environment. It encourages readers and translators to become unshackled from rules, assumptions, and conventions as they reflect …

Contributors

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

No abstract provided.

Dog Barking At The Moon : Transcreation Of A Meme In Art And Poetry, Cosima Bruno

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This essay explores the dynamics of transcreation in art and poetry, focusing on the image of a dog barking at the moon in four Taiwanese poems. By putting them in connection with each other and with other texts from different times and artistic traditions, I wish to contribute to a dismantling of the “influence paradigm,” move beyond contestations over the comparative approach, and demonstrate a critical method that recognizes the enduring fascination for the meme but equally appreciates change, approximation and adaptation, rather than closed-off conversion from a source text to a target text.

Mapping Hong Kong’S Atlas, Christopher Mattison

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Rooted in the broader project of representing Hong Kong through the visual and literary arts, the Hong Kong Atlas book series seeks to build a set of heritage-based networks through a literary series consisting primarily of paperback and digital editions, including bilingual poetry collections. The individual voices of the authors and translators combine to reorient the complexities of memory in relation to Hong Kong’s constantly shifting pasts.

The Cultural Translation Of Battlers Poetry (Dagong Shige), Maghiel Van Crevel

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Contemporary mainland-Chinese poetry displays a great deal of diversity and dynamism. Battlers poetry (dagong shige)—writing by members of the underclass of domestic migrant workers—is a relatively recent arrival. This essay delves into the discourse surrounding battlers poetry and its interactions with other poetry “departments,” particularly that of avant-garde poetry. It does so from the perspective of cultural translation. I argue that this is especially helpful for understanding the dynamics of battlers poetry, and of “poetry” at large as a discursive space in China today. The essay offers a discussion of translated people, texts in transit, commentary as conflict …

Forms Of World Literature And The Taipei Poetry Festival, Nick Admussen

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

In poetry anthologies and works of literary criticism, the authority to select which literature can become “world” literature often lies with a single editor or theorist. This essay contrasts those centralizations of authority with the more egalitarian structure of international poetry festivals. Using the 2016 Taipei Poetry Festival as an example, the essay reads the impact of the form of the festival on its audience’s experience of translation, the local in the transnational, and intercultural solidarity. The essay then argues that boredom is a formal flaw in contemporary festivals, and advocates that translations be performed in local vernaculars.

Half-Heard Voices Of The Primal Zone; Sleep And Waking In A Poem By Cao Shuying, George O’Connell, Diana Shi

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

Initially touching artifacts and sculpture from ancient Greece, and the risk of misreading thought or emotion cross-culturally, this essay draws briefly on Wordsworth’s testimony that poetic process arises first in a primally sensual and pre-verbal zone. The essay then proposes that similar practice, carried by craft and poetic experience in the target language, may be equally advantageous in poetry translation, while helping bridge individual and cross-cultural differences. In light of this, the essay’s second half addresses translational details in rendering Cao Shuying’s poem “I Often Read, Early Mornings.”

Where You End And I Begin : Notes On Subjectivity And Ethics In The Translation Of Poetry, Andrea Lingenfelter

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

What can translation teach us about poetry and poetics? To what extent is a lyric constellation portable, and to what extent is it embedded in a particular culture or language? How much of a foreign syntax can be replicated before things break down? What is the role of sound in a translation? By discussing poems by three poets whose work I have translated—the Taiwanese poet Yang Mu and the mainland-Chinese poets Zhai Yongming and Wang Yin—this paper explores issues such as the above. It connects these issues with the question of “where you end and I begin” and vice versa, …

Translation In Distraction : On Eileen Chang’S “Chinese Translation: A Vehicle Of Cultural Influence”, Christopher Lee

Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報

This essay focuses on a previously obscure and only recently republished English text held at USC that offers an unparalleled window into Chang’s engagement with translation. The untitled manuscript, typed with handwritten additions and corrections, is contained in a folder marked “Untitled article or speech” and appears to be the script of an oral presentation in which Chang surveys the development of translation in China from the late-Qing period, through the 1911 revolution, the May Fourth period, the war with Japan, the 1949 revolution and the Cultural Revolution. Her speech emphasizes how translation functioned as an index to China’s fraught …