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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Western Theory’S Chinese Transformation: Postscript, Liu Kang Mar 2024

Western Theory’S Chinese Transformation: Postscript, Liu Kang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Out Of The Myths Of “Revolutionary China”: Liu Kang Versus Žižek & Badiou, Liu Xin Mar 2024

Out Of The Myths Of “Revolutionary China”: Liu Kang Versus Žižek & Badiou, Liu Xin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The highlight of the 2011 special issue of Positions on Slavoj Žižek is the debate between Liu Kang and Žižek on “Revolutionary China.” It unpacks the Western left’s political unconsciousness and myths about China in several respects. First, revolution is not a parody-travesty of the “tradition” that Žižek concocts from romanticized fantasies of a “retrospective tradition” drawn from Jorge Luis Borges and T. S. Eliot. Second, revolution is not Alain Badiou’s “truth event,” which tends to reduce the Chinese Cultural Revolution to an abstract “event” in process, neglecting the real calamities of the so-called utopian experiment. Third, the key problematic …


Two Imagined Chinas In Tel Quel, Wang Yichen Mar 2024

Two Imagined Chinas In Tel Quel, Wang Yichen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

From the mid-1960s, the literary review Tel Quel shifted its anti-traditional and avant-garde stance in arts and literature toward politics within the radical political context in France. Its editor Philippe Sollers initiated a “political turn,” marked by its transformation from its “structuralist period” to its “China period.” Its “China period” inadvertently created a “textual spectacle” of two imagined Chinas: first, a poetic, static “ancient China” represented by Daoism (Taoism), Chinese ideograms, and classical Chinese art and poetry; and second, a revolutionary, subversive “modern China” represented by Maoism along with Lu Xun and other left-wing writers. Taking appropriation, rather than misreading, …


Deleuze’S Challenge To Hegel’S Aesthetics—Chinese Aesthetics In The Confrontation Between German Classical Aesthetics And Postmodernism, Wu Yuyu Mar 2024

Deleuze’S Challenge To Hegel’S Aesthetics—Chinese Aesthetics In The Confrontation Between German Classical Aesthetics And Postmodernism, Wu Yuyu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

German classical aesthetics, featuring a systematic analysis of concepts and theories, plays a fundamental role in the founding of Chinese modern aesthetics. From the 1980s, when the spread of Western theories began to flourish, Chinese scholars assimilated deconstructionist thought (for example, that of Deleuze) and started to reflect on German classical aesthetics as represented by Kant and Hegel. Chinese aesthetics presents various characteristics in the confrontation between German classical aesthetics and French deconstructionist thought. From the perspective of German classical aesthetics, China has no philosophy, tragedy, or system. The Chinese culture became a thinking resource for criticizing essentialism and dualism …


French Left-Wing Literary Theory And Mao Zedong Thought, Han Zhenjiang, Zhang Yuling Mar 2024

French Left-Wing Literary Theory And Mao Zedong Thought, Han Zhenjiang, Zhang Yuling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

French left-wing literary theories have continued to accept and interpret Mao Zedong’s thought (including his theories on literature and art) from the 1960s to today. This intellectual communication enabled the formation of Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism and contemporary left-wing literary theory. Mao’s theory of contradiction and his thoughts on reliance on the popular masses, aesthetics and politics, and people’s literature and art are the major intellectual resources for Louis Althusser’s, Alain Badiou’s, and Slavoj Žižek’s theories and are fully integrated into their theoretical system and critical practice. Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek innovated materialistic dialectics on the basis of Mao’s theory …


“China Form” And The Question Of The Frankfurt School, Duan Jifang Mar 2024

“China Form” And The Question Of The Frankfurt School, Duan Jifang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Theories of the Frankfurt School were introduced into aesthetics studies in China at the end of the 1970s. After more than 40 years of theoretical journey, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have undergone a process from “criticism/query/opposition” to “recognition/acceptance/approval,” and have also substantially completed “theoretical linkage” with Chinese aesthetics. As a Western discourse, the theories of the Frankfurt School, like other theories, are faced with scrutinization in the Chinese context. China’s acceptance of the School plays an objective role in promoting the transformation of its contemporary aesthetic discourse, making contemporary aesthetic research in China more obvious in its problem …


Knowledge Production In The Theory Of Literature And Art In Contemporary China: From A Generations Perspective, Tao Dongfeng, Zhang Chun Mar 2024

Knowledge Production In The Theory Of Literature And Art In Contemporary China: From A Generations Perspective, Tao Dongfeng, Zhang Chun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the field of theory of literature and art (i.e., the discipline of Wenyi xue) in contemporary China, the post-1930s and the post-1950s generations (scholars who were born between 1930 and 1939 and between 1950 and 1959, respectively) are the most influential ones. They are father and son generations both in a physiological and a sociocultural sense; both occupied or are still occupying important positions in Chinese academia. Their profound differences in life experiences, educational background, intellectual structures, cultural stances, and literary perspectives significantly affect their knowledge production in Chinese literary theory. This article attempts to use Karl Mannheim’s …


Chinese Modern Leftist Affect And Aesthetic-Affective Modernity In The Global Affective Turn, Yan Fang Mar 2024

Chinese Modern Leftist Affect And Aesthetic-Affective Modernity In The Global Affective Turn, Yan Fang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Influenced by China’s distinctive “qing” tradition, ranging from the “affective Enlightenment” to the sentimental/affective revolution, both China’s modern Enlightenment movement and the Chinese leftists’ endeavors for social transformation and revolution heavily relied on the emotions and affect, especially those within literature, art, and aesthetics. The dyna mics of “moods” proposed by Qu Qiubai, the “national form” movement, and the Maoist affect not only foreshadowed and actualized but also enriched the conceptualizations of feelings, emotions, and affect by Western theorists such as Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière. With its meticulous portrayal and innovative theorization of the …


Traveling Theory And Discursive Transformation: The Reception Of Walter Benjamin And Emmanuel Levinas In China, Wang Jiajun, Tang Qilin Mar 2024

Traveling Theory And Discursive Transformation: The Reception Of Walter Benjamin And Emmanuel Levinas In China, Wang Jiajun, Tang Qilin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Chinese scholars are increasingly interested in Jewish philosophy and culture and the philosophical concept of redemption. That is bringing about more and more studies on Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas, two of the most well-known Jewish philosophers. In these studies, conducted with different approaches and from diverse perspectives, Chinese scholars are attempting to connect the philosophers’ theories with some of their Chinese counterparts. Overall, they are well received or Sinicized, but in different fields, and to different extent, deserving an in-depth comparative study. Obviously a large amount of works have been produced in attempts to have dialogues with Benjamin and …


The Many Afterlives Of Orientalism: Translation, Reception, And Appropriation Of Saidian Theory In China, Wu You Mar 2024

The Many Afterlives Of Orientalism: Translation, Reception, And Appropriation Of Saidian Theory In China, Wu You

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

During the mass translation of Western “post-isms” since the 1990s, Saidian postcolonial theory, Orientalism in particular, was introduced to China through interpretation, reception, and appropriation in the Chinese academe, becoming an important discursive tool for the debate about China. The translated work is perceived as the “afterlife” of the original work, and Saidian theory achieves its constantly renewed and comprehensive unfolding through translation and critical reception in China. In this sense, translation contributes to the complexity and multiplicity of traveling theories, which plays an important part in the formation of Chinese literary theories. Arguably, theoretical transformation occurs through debates and …


The Making Of Chinese Meixue, Li Qingben, Wang Gang Mar 2024

The Making Of Chinese Meixue, Li Qingben, Wang Gang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “The Making of Chinese Meixue,” Li and Wang discuss the Chinese translation of the term “aesthetics.” It had been believed that it was the German missionary Ernst Faber who first coined the Chinese term “meixue,” which is refuted in this paper. The view that the term “shenmeixue” in Japan was derived from Wilhelm Lobscheid’s English and Chinese Dictionary also lacks factual basis. It is true that the term “meixue” was introduced to China from the West via Japan, but it was then a term that had not yet developed within a specific …


Introduction: Western Theory’S Chinese Transformation, Zeng Jun Mar 2024

Introduction: Western Theory’S Chinese Transformation, Zeng Jun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


On Gary Snyder’S Tradaptation Of Cold Mountain Poems And Its Spiritual Salvation And Literary Enlightenment In Postwar America, Hu Anjiang Oct 2023

On Gary Snyder’S Tradaptation Of Cold Mountain Poems And Its Spiritual Salvation And Literary Enlightenment In Postwar America, Hu Anjiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of …


Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah Oct 2023

Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of …


Westernization Or Localization? The (Mis)Reading Of “The Tragic” In Modern Chinese Literary Discourse, Tian Gu Oct 2023

Westernization Or Localization? The (Mis)Reading Of “The Tragic” In Modern Chinese Literary Discourse, Tian Gu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the features and causal factors in constructing an idea of the tragic in modern Chinese literary discourse. It attempts at revisiting and reproducing the realities of misreading and variation upon modern Chinese introduction of the term “tragedy” (beiju) at different socio-historical periods, and has observed the interplay between two trends, namely, Westernization and localization, through the negotiation of “the tragic” into modern Chinese literary practice. These two trends have been integrated by a political and pragmatic perspective, which dominates the formation of a modern Chinese literary discourse on “the tragic”. This perspective offers both possibility …


Children’S Gothic In The Chinese Context: The Untranslatability And Cross-Cultural Readability Of A Literary Genre, Chengcheng You Oct 2023

Children’S Gothic In The Chinese Context: The Untranslatability And Cross-Cultural Readability Of A Literary Genre, Chengcheng You

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999­–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability …


Translating Literary Ideology From Ancient Chinese Into Modern French: François Cheng’S Francophone Poetry In Double Chant (2000), Gabriel F. Y. Tsang Oct 2023

Translating Literary Ideology From Ancient Chinese Into Modern French: François Cheng’S Francophone Poetry In Double Chant (2000), Gabriel F. Y. Tsang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

François Cheng (1929- ), elected to the Académie Française in 2002, structurally introduced the lexicological, syntactic, and semiotic form of Tang poetry to the French academia via his academic works. In the late 1980s, François Cheng shifted his focus from academic writing to creative writing, both in French, winning the 1998 Prix Femina for his novel Le Dit de Tianyi (1998) and Prix Roger Caillois for his collection of poems Double chant (2000). Focusing on his less-discussed poetry, which reveals higher congruity of his understanding of Chinese literary classics with creative representation, this paper argues that, as an analyst of …


Storytelling As A Way Of Translation: The Rendition Of Taoism In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe Of Heaven, Xiulu Wang Oct 2023

Storytelling As A Way Of Translation: The Rendition Of Taoism In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe Of Heaven, Xiulu Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is an immensely popular author of numerous science fictions and fantasy classics. A number of critics have noticed the influence of Taoism on Le Guin’s writing.critical insights offered by Translation Studies and Walter Benjamin’s comments on storytelling and translation, this paper argues that storytelling and translation are similar discursive practices that aim at the exchange of experiences, creating knowledge, and shaping culture. Taking Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) as a case study, this paper delves into how her storytelling serves as a unique form of translation, bridging the thought of ancient Chinese Taoist …


Ecopoetry As Method: Reading Gary Snyder As A Cultural Mediator Between China And The World, Winnie L M Yee Oct 2023

Ecopoetry As Method: Reading Gary Snyder As A Cultural Mediator Between China And The World, Winnie L M Yee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ecocriticism is a field that is inherently cross-cultural, and poetry is an art form that creates bonds across cultural communities. This paper focuses on Gary Snyder, a prominent poet in his own right, who is famous for his translation of the works by Chinese poet Han Shan. His attraction to Chinese classical poetry and Eastern civilization offers an alternative to the Western developmental paradigm, and the ecopoetry he espouses is pertinent to today’s environmental debates. His references to nature do not function merely as reminders that nature should be respected but as an impetus to reflect on the coexistence of …


Playing With Time: Writing History In Neo-Zionist Hebrew Literature, Huiruo Li Oct 2023

Playing With Time: Writing History In Neo-Zionist Hebrew Literature, Huiruo Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The term neo-Zionism can be used to group ideologically much of contemporary Hebrew literature. However, since neo-Zionism shares similar critical tools with post-Zionism, while also sharing a common political vision with Zionism, it has been difficult to find the definitive signifiers of neo-Zionist writing. This paper offers a way to determine the nuanced ideological inclination of Hebrew literature: the presentation of time. First, this paper recognizes the metamorphosis of time in Israeli literary history that reflects the writers’ historical view of the Zionist agenda. Zionist Hebrew literature was engaged in re-establishing Jewish historical time by emphasizing the relationship between time …


The Animal In The Wild In Hwang Sun-Mi’S The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, Sarah Yoon Oct 2023

The Animal In The Wild In Hwang Sun-Mi’S The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, Sarah Yoon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Hwang Sun-mi’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly has become a contemporary classic children’s story in Korea since its original publication in 2000. Since then, the story has been translated and redesigned with new illustrations in almost thirty different countries (Y. Kim). The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly centers on a hen that raises a duckling as her “baby,” with the story drawing upon a rich reservoir of cultural associations between humans and nature in East Asian traditions. In this story, the hen leaves the human-dominated barnyard, based on profit, exploitation, and competition, for a reconnection with moral …


Translating Diversity From Ralph Ellison To Kenzaburō Ōe, Raphaël Lambert Oct 2023

Translating Diversity From Ralph Ellison To Kenzaburō Ōe, Raphaël Lambert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it endeavors to understand the vagaries of the notion of diversity as it travels from one national and political context to the next; and second, it shows how two major fiction writers and essayists have used that notion in their work and to what ends. The first part focuses on the work of Ralph Ellison, who put diversity at the heart of his reflection on what a truly democratic American society should be. Kenzaburō Ōe initially borrowed the notion of diversity from Ellison himself, but as the second part demonstrates, Ōe did …


Remembering Complicity And Resistance: A Review Of Mihaela Mihai’S Political Memory And The Aesthetics Of Care: The Art Of Complicity And Resistance (2022), Sofía Forchieri Feb 2023

Remembering Complicity And Resistance: A Review Of Mihaela Mihai’S Political Memory And The Aesthetics Of Care: The Art Of Complicity And Resistance (2022), Sofía Forchieri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds …


A Semiotic Paradox: Scientific Language In The Narrative Of Tv Advertisement-, Maria Jesus De Prada Vicente Feb 2023

A Semiotic Paradox: Scientific Language In The Narrative Of Tv Advertisement-, Maria Jesus De Prada Vicente

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The narrative we find in TV advertisement especially abounds in scientific terms that the viewers hardly understand. The apparently ‘scientific’ language induces them to believe in the modern myth of science as absolute truth, which inevitably produces alienation from reality. The more such language triumphs, the more alienation they suffer without knowing it. Such is our situation today that reminds us of the time of Nazi in which alienating language was dominant. However, whether the use of scientific language on TV advertisement becomes alienating or not depends on the socio-cultural context of the viewers. For example, in Japan where the …


Terada Torahiko, A Physicist And A Haikai Poet, Akira Komiya Feb 2023

Terada Torahiko, A Physicist And A Haikai Poet, Akira Komiya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads …


Bergson On Poetics: Philosophy, Literature And Science, Michel Dalissier Feb 2023

Bergson On Poetics: Philosophy, Literature And Science, Michel Dalissier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this paper, I analyze Henri Bergson’s insightful and contrasted vision of poetry. First, I show in what sense Bergson sympathizes with the idea that the poet must be credited to surpass the novelist in offering to us an unparalleled emotional apprehension of the world. Second, I nonetheless underline how Bergson grants the product of the poet, i.e., the poem itself, a problematic linguistic status, inasmuch as the focus of his analysis shifts from an intersubjective poetical apprehension of feelings to their individual poetic appreciation, or from the spiritual dimension of poetry to its material dimension. Third, I further suggest …


Language, Science And Literature, Hitoshi Oshima Feb 2023

Language, Science And Literature, Hitoshi Oshima

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The creativity of language Chomsky puts so much importance on must be questioned because the same creativity has produced lethal weapons such as atomic bombs. Modern science developed by the power of language has certainly produced many beneficial things, but we should not overlook its destructive side. Besides, language capable of inventing a new reality leads us to believe in it blindly. Let us remember philosophers such as Wittgenstein or Nagarjuna who warned us not to believe in the construct called “reality” made up by language power.Now, is it better and safer then to use a metaphorical language that composes …


Coming Of Age And Exile In No Pasó Nada, Regina Maria Faunes Feb 2023

Coming Of Age And Exile In No Pasó Nada, Regina Maria Faunes

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article examines the effect of exile on the coming-of-age process in Skármeta’s novel, No pasó nada. Through textual analysis and the application of theories surrounding identity formation, socialization, and the accommodation of the individual into society, the paper demonstrates how exile both complicates and acts as a catalyst in the protagonist’s coming of age. Despite the fact that the novel was published in the second half of the twentieth century, the protagonist follows the classical coming-of-age process depicted in nineteenth-century texts, prior to changes brought about by late capitalism, globalization and the explosion of digital media platforms that …


Orature: The Political Interpretation Of Performance Framework In Anthills Of The Savannah And Half Of A Yellow Sun, Jing Duan Feb 2023

Orature: The Political Interpretation Of Performance Framework In Anthills Of The Savannah And Half Of A Yellow Sun, Jing Duan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity …


Political Orientation In Ecocriticism: National Allegory In Vietnamese Ecofiction By Trần Duy Phiên, Chi P. Pham Feb 2023

Political Orientation In Ecocriticism: National Allegory In Vietnamese Ecofiction By Trần Duy Phiên, Chi P. Pham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Since the late 1990s, theories and practices of ecocriticism have tended to be more politically engaged than in its earliest phase, considering that “environmental problems cannot be solved without addressing issues of wealth and poverty, overconsumption, underdevelopment, and the notion of resource scarcity” (Heise 251-2). This paper engages with the political orientation in ecocriticism by examining presentations of humans and nature in three Vietnamese short stories – “Kiến và người” (The Ants and the Man, 1990), “Mối và người” (The Termite and the Man, 1992), and “Nhện và người” (The Spider and the Man, 2012) by Trần Duy Phiên (born …