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Full-Text Articles in Chinese Studies

Cyborg Feminism And Toxic Colonialism In Chen Qiufan’S Waste Tide, Yuan Yuan Jan 2026

Cyborg Feminism And Toxic Colonialism In Chen Qiufan’S Waste Tide, Yuan Yuan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article probes into the interrelationships among cyborg technology, sexual violence, and toxic colonialism represented in the Chinese SF novel Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan. It applies methodologies in posthumanism and ecofeminism and situates the text in the Chinese as well as a global context. It intends to provide a non-Western perspective to understand cyborg feminism by associating the Chinese historical reality with trans-species thinking. It argues that the SF author Chen Qiufan is critical about the anthropogenic body modifications which may challenge the process of female resistance and resilience in the face of gender and colonial oppression. By doing …


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 …


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 …


Female Bonding And Marginality In Shang Wanyun’S Novella “Xialihe” (1978), Antonio Paoliello Jun 2022

Female Bonding And Marginality In Shang Wanyun’S Novella “Xialihe” (1978), Antonio Paoliello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article explores the representation of homosociality between two marginalized female characters in “Xialihe” (夏麗赫) (1978), a novella by Sinophone Malaysian writer Shang Wanyun (商晚) (1952-1995). Although some scholars have suggested that the writer’s preoccupation with the intimate world of women started only in the 1980s, I argue that “Xialihe” already highlights issues such as female intimacy and women’s social marginalization. The text represents, therefore, a link between her earlier nativist production and her later more feminist approach. Additionally, I contend that, writing from a marginal position at the periphery of Malaysia’s national literary system and from a doubly-conservative environment …


Problems With Perceptual And Cognitive Idiosyncrasies In Li Wenjun’S Translation Of The Benjy Section Of Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Aaron L. Moore Mar 2021

Problems With Perceptual And Cognitive Idiosyncrasies In Li Wenjun’S Translation Of The Benjy Section Of Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Aaron L. Moore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Problems with Perceptual and Cognitive Idiosyncrasies in Li Wenjun’s Translation of the Benjy Section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Aaron Lee Moore conducts a close explication of a 2014 English-Chinese edition of part of The Sound and the Fury. Li Wenjun’s translation of the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury is certainly admirable in its graceful rendering of Faulkner’s complex, idiosyncratic prose style into accessible Chinese—and particularly laudable in its meticulous tracking of the a-chronological sequence of Benjy’s stream of consciousness narrative. However, problems arise in the translation due to an …


Writing, Rewriting, And Miswriting: Eileen Chang’S Late Style Against The Grain, Lina Qu Feb 2020

Writing, Rewriting, And Miswriting: Eileen Chang’S Late Style Against The Grain, Lina Qu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Writing, Rewriting, and Miswriting: Eileen Chang’s Late Style Against the Grain,” Lina Qu reconstructs Eileen Chang as a Saidian late figure and formulates the poetics and politics of lateness immanent in her late self-writing. Drawing from Said’s theorization, Qu argues that Chang’s late style emerges and matures in rewriting her memories into numerous autobiographical accounts. The exposé of her dysfunctional family and turbulent life metonymically constitutes a counter narrative that disenchants Chinese modernity. In contrast to the dominant modalities of evolution and revolution, her involutionary discourse embodies a Deleuzian paradigm of artistic creativity and historical development. Qu …


Farmer, Priest, And Poet: Knowledge Transmission And Wisdom In Works And Days And Gelimu, Duoduo Xu Feb 2020

Farmer, Priest, And Poet: Knowledge Transmission And Wisdom In Works And Days And Gelimu, Duoduo Xu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper aims at a comparison between a classic poem from ancient Greek literature, the Works and Days by Hesiod, and ancestral records of hemerology from Daba Culture, entitled Gelimu, collected during my fieldwork in South-West China. Both traditions use constellations to mark important dates throughout the year, providing similar instructions on how to deal with daily work in the fields. Moreover, their mnemonic strategies and formulaic verses reflect their origins from oral traditions passed down from generation to generation. Starting from these basic similarities, the author analyzed the roles of Daba priests, the calendars authors, and Hesiod, the …


Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim Jul 2019

Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …


The Disenchantment Of History And The Tragic Consciousness Of Chinese Postmodernity, Alberto Castelli Jul 2019

The Disenchantment Of History And The Tragic Consciousness Of Chinese Postmodernity, Alberto Castelli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Magic Realism brings fantastic events into the frame of the narration. Yet it cannot quite be defined. At the very start of the process of definition, there is a question: Magic Realism is a mode of narration, or rather a post-colonial movement rising sociological issues alternative to the logic of power? The paper parallels and juxtaposes Latin American Magic Realism and the literary experience of Chinese literary Avant-garde in the 80s, similar apocalyptic thematic, but different narrative structures. Relating to the fictional universe of Can Xue and Yu Hua, the aim is to illuminate an exclusive mode to narrate history: …


Maoist Aesthetics In Western Left-Wing Thought, Jun Zeng, Siying Duan Sep 2018

Maoist Aesthetics In Western Left-Wing Thought, Jun Zeng, Siying Duan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article “Maoist Aesthetics in Western Left-wing Thought,” Jun Zeng and Siying Duan discuss a terrain of knowledge called “Maoist aesthetics,” which is the creative misreading of Mao’s “On Contradiction,” the theory and practice of “Cultural Revolution” and other revolutionary literature and arts of Mao’s time by Western Left intellectuals. Scholars and academic communities inspired by Maoism include Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Pierre Althusser, the Chinese period of Tel Quel, Fredric Jameson, Arif Dirlik, and Contemporary Radical Left intellectuals such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Comparative study of the mutual influence of …


China And The Politics Of Cross–Cultural Representation In Interwar European Fiction, Carles Prado-Fonts Sep 2017

China And The Politics Of Cross–Cultural Representation In Interwar European Fiction, Carles Prado-Fonts

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "China and the Politics of Cross–Cultural Representation in Interwar European Fiction" Carles Prado-Fonts analyzes Joan Crespi's La ciutat de la por (The City of Fear, 1930) to illustrate the varied representations of China in interwar Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s, a plurality of views on China and the Chinese people became widespread across different parts of Europe, mainly shaped by English, French, and German representations. Contradictory images of China coexisted in literature, thought, and popular culture. Crespi's work exemplifies these contradictions: China appears as both an attainable reality and an unreachable fantasy, two tropes that prevailed …


Positions Of Sinophone Representation In Jin's (金庸) Chivalric Topography, Weijie Song Mar 2015

Positions Of Sinophone Representation In Jin's (金庸) Chivalric Topography, Weijie Song

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Positions of Sinophone Representation in Jin's (金庸) Chivalric Topography" Weijie Song examines Yong Jin's post-1949 Hong Kong chivalric imagination of imperial Beijing and beyond during the Ming-Qing Dynastic transition and the dialects of inclusive exclusion and exclusive inclusion. In Cold War Hong Kong, Jin charted a wide range of chivalric activities: intruding into the political center embodied by the Forbidden City (the "Great Within") and fleeing to peripheral regions such as Xinjiang's Islamic community, the overseas kingdom in Brunei in Southeast Asia, and an unknown place somewhere inside Yangzhou. Song argues that Jin's literary topography suggests a …


Chinese Literature's Route To World Literature, Hongtao Liu Mar 2015

Chinese Literature's Route To World Literature, Hongtao Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Chinese Literature's Route to World Literature" Hongtao Liu argues that Goethe's theory of world literature based on the conflicting and unifying values of cosmopolitanism and localism has fueled Chinese literature's desire to join world literatures. Proposed by Zhenduo Zheng with the notion of the "unification of literature" at the beginning of the twentieth century and developed in the 1980s, the "global elements of twentieth-century Chinese literature" in the twenty-first century, this notion remains a feature of Chinese literature's global trajectory. Liu argues that although the experience of a number of transitions, China's pursuit remains relevant and translation …