This dissertation is a comparative study of the properties that distinguish Chinese fiction from its counterpart in the West. I argue that the nonmimetic nature of Chinese literary theory is derived from the world view epitomized in the concept of Dao as opposed to the Western definition of truth. Instead of representing dao, wen X (writing) is born out of, and remains part of, dao. The way in which orthodox Confucianist discourse takes shape and operates decides that fiction cannot have a cognitive function and, therefore, determines its low status in China. The Chinese term "xiao shuo" (small talk), which is always translated as "fiction," has clearly different associations from the Western word. Unlike "fiction," which mainly denotes the dualism of truth and falsehood, xiao shuo primarily signifies a value judgment. Xiao shuo is neither purely literature nor a genre in pre-modern China. Subsequently I propose that concepts such as "you xi" (game) or "qi" (the strange) are more appropriate constructs for approaching Chinese fiction than "realism" or any other Western term. On the basis of analysis of these indigenous terms, I conclude that we should recover the lost traditional criticism, which represents a unique understanding of pre-modern Chinese fiction.

This project engages a cultural studies approach to translation. I investigate different thematic issues, each of which underscores the underpinning force of cultural translation. Chapter 1 serves as a theoretical background to the entire work, in which I review the development of translation studies in the Anglo-American world and attempt to connect it to subject theory, cultural theory, and social critical theory. The main aim is to show how translation constitutes and mediates subject (re)formation and social justice. From the view of translation as constitutive of political and cultural processes, Chapter 2 tells the history of translation in Vietnam while critiquing Homi Bhabha's notions of cultural translation, hybridity, and ambivalence. I argue that the Vietnamese, as historical colonized subjects, have always been hybrid and ambivalent in regard to their language, culture, and identity. The specific acts of translation that the Vietnamese engaged in throughout their history show that Vietnam during French rule was a site of cultural translation in which both the colonized and the colonizer participated in the mediation and negotiation of their identities. Chapter 3 presents a shift in focus, from cultural translation in the colonial context to the postcolonial resignifications of femininity. In a culture of perpetual translation, the Vietnamese woman is constantly resignified to suite emerging political conditions. In this chapter, I examine an array of texts from different genres—poetry, fiction, and film—to criticize Judith Bulter's notion of gender performativity. A feminist politics that aims to counter the regulatory discourse of femininity, I argue, needs to attend to the powerful mechanism of resignification, not as a basis of resistance, but as a form of suppression. The traditional binary of power as essentializing and resistance as de-essentializing does not work in the Vietnamese context. Continuing the line of gender studies, Chapter 4 enunciates a specific strategy for translating Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain into contemporary Vietnamese culture. Based on my cultural analysis of the discursive displacement of translation and homosexuality, I propose to use domesticating translation, against Lawrence Venuti's politics of foreignizing, as a way to counter the displacement and reinstate both homosexuality and translation itself.

This dissertation attempts to open up new possibilities in the interpretation of Liaozhai Zhiyi sk45, the criticism of which in the past four decades has been predominantly political (Marxist) and biographical. My interpretation of Liaozhai draws on four psychoanalytic theories: Freudian (also ego psychology), Jungian, feminist and Winnicottian. In chapters two through six, my discussion of thirty-three full-length Liaozhai stories is guided by Jung's conceptualization of the collective unconscious and the individuation process. The intricate and dynamic relations between human and supernatural characters are reimagined as those between the conscious mind and a group of Jungian archetypes (the shadow, the anima, the mother, etc.). In chapter seven, my discussion of "Feng Sanniang" sk45, a unique Liaozhai story in which a young woman is helped in magic ways by a female fox spirit, questions Jung's animus archetype. My interpretation of it draws on Nancy Chodorow's theory on the development of the feminine psyche in relation to the preoedipal and oedipal mothers and the oedipal father. Next, my reading of several Liaozhai stories emphasizes a hidden theme (male Oedipus complex) and some defense maneuvers (splitting, displacement, projection, regression, denial, sublimation, etc.). Finally my interpretation of "Yingning" sk45 is guided by Winnicott's theorizing of what happens between self and other in infancy. Instead of fragmenting the story, this reading brings all characters into comparison and sheds light on otherwise puzzling descriptions. With this example, I try to demonstrate that the psychoanalytic approach tends to require the critic to treat a literary work as an organic whole and examine details of the language to look for a convergence of themes. In my dissertation I argue that fantasy allows Pu Songling sk30 freedom to explore and portray what was repressed socially, personally and politically. The stories may be perceived as dreamwork to illustrate and resolve problems of the self, and psychoanalytic approaches may reveal symbols, paradoxes, recurring themes and unconscious fantasies which are embedded in the texts and so far have not been adequately explored.

My dissertation is aimed at examining each translation methods and strategies used by Lin Shu, Yan Fu, and Liang Qichao and, more importantly, exploring the contribution of their translations to the formation of a consciousness of Chineseness. I hope to show that rather than serving as a tool to literary history, translation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century served as one of the most important tools for introducing new ideas and producing cultural changes. In chapter one, I first give an historical account of the formation of Chineseness in the late Qing period and its current problematic status. Then I introduce briefly Chinese translation history, which still remains largely obscure to Western readers. Finally I provide readers with biographical information about the three Chinese translators and with a basic acquaintance of their translations. Chapter two starts with a review of the criticism of Lin Shu’s translations. After a comparison of different translational motives behind Lin’s first two translation projects, I map out a constellation of emotional, cultural, and commercial motives, suggesting that Lin Shu started his translation career in a turbulent era when new cultural paradigms and national consciousness were looming in the distance. Chapter three devotes many pages to Yan Fu’s three translation criteria: xin (accuracy), da (intelligibility), and ya (elegance). I argue that Yan Fu imbues these three ancient concepts with new meanings and tries to establish a new standard genre that is suitable to modern science. Though Yan Fu follows the original closer than does Lin Shu, he intervenes and manipulates the source text to the extent that his translation cannot be called literary translation. A study of Liang Qichao’s theory of fiction constitutes the main part of chapter four. Liang Qichao promotes a completely politically charged literary genre to sharpen Chinese consciousness. I offer a comparison of traditional Chinese ideas of fiction and Liang’s new fiction doctrine. Finally I examine Japanese influence on Liang’s literary and political ideas. In the conclusion chapter, I argue that the three Chinese translators not only tested the plasticity of the Chinese language in accommodating foreign languages, but also destabilized the boundary within the Chinese language. By using an unfamiliar language to translate an unknown language, the three Chinese translators longed for a new Chinese language that would become the mother tongue of the Chinese people as opposed to other races and ethnicities.

Social breakdown and the failure of Han Confucianism in the middle of third century A.D. China turned the Shi literati to Daoism for inspiration to construct an authentic way of life. The subsequent one hundred and fifty years were a cultural process of dissonant cacophony, in which the synthesis of the two ideologies finally had to give way to Buddhism. The process, what is called the Neo-Daoist Movement, is to date still in demand of an interdisciplinary, vigorously historical, study. This writing traces a dialectical cultural and mental development by examining the Shi-literati's life and works, including philosophy and literature, and their often exaggerated behavior in everyday life. It reveals that, in yearning for a life of transcendence, the Shi also wanted to maintain their worldly engagement, and subsequently constructed a paradoxical world view that provided them a spiritual space in a time of social turmoil. By investigating the Shi's cosmology, and their sense of community and self-definition, the present study elucidates the possibilities, as well as the limits, of what they constructed as the authentic life. The possibilities and limits can be seen most clearly in the works of Tao Yuan-mind, a great poet who lived at the ending period of the era. Living the life of a farmer, Tao Yuan-mind roughed through life's hardship by taking a spiritual stance that was congenial to both Confucianism and Daoism. In its own way, Tao's poetry brought out what Neo-Daoism should have come to but never did. Precisely because of this nature, Tao's works were historical while transcending the times. In this detailed study of an individual writer and Neo-Daoism, we complete the spiritual-mapping of the era.

<p> This is a study of the rise of science fiction as a subculture in the 1960s through an analysis of the first and longest-running commercial science fiction magazine in Japan: <i>SF Magazine.</i> Much of the research on science fiction in Japan focuses on the boom in the 1980s or on the very first science fictional texts created in the early years of the twentieth century, glossing over this pivotal decade. From 1959-1969, <i>SF Magazine </i>&rsquo;s covers created a visual legacy of the relationship of the human body to space that reveals larger concerns about technology, science, and humanity. This legacy centers around the mediation of human existence through technology (called the posthuman), which also transforms our understanding of gender and space in contemporary works. I examine the constellation of Japanese conceptions of the body in science fiction, its manifestations and limits, exploring how the representation of this Japanese, posthuman, and often cyborgian body is figured as an absence in the space of science fiction landscapes. <i>SF Magazine</i> was used by consumers to construct meanings of self, social identity, and social relations. Science fiction illustration complemented and supported the centrality of <i>SF Magazine,</i> making these illustrations integral to the production the of science fiction subculture and to the place of the body within Japanese science fiction. Their representation of space, and then in the later part of the 1960s the return of the body to these covers, mirrors the theoretical and emotional concerns of not just science fiction writers and readers in the 1960s, but the larger social and historical concerns present in the country at large.</p><p> The horrifying and painful mutability of bodies that came to light after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki manifests, in the latter years of the 1960s in science fiction, as the fantastically powerful mutating bodies of super heroes and cyborgs within the science fictional world. The bombed spaces of the postwar (largely ignored in mainstream 1960s media) were reimagined in productive ways on the covers of <i>SF Magazine,</i> mirroring the fiction and nonfictional contents. It is through this publication that a recognizable community emerges, a particular type of identity becomes associated with the science fiction fan that coalesced when the magazine began to offer different points of articulation, both through the covers and through the magazine&rsquo;s contents. That notion of the science fiction fan as a particular subjectivity, as a particular way to navigate the world, created a space to articulate trauma and to investigate ways out of that trauma not available in mainstream works.</p><p> My work seeks to build on literary scholarship that considers the role commercial and pulp genres fiction play in negotiating and constructing community. I contribute to recent scholarship in art history that investigates the close relationship of Surrealism to mass culture movements in postwar Japan, although these art historians largely center their work on advertising in the pre-war context. Furthermore, my project reconsiders the importance of the visual to a definition of science fiction: it is only when the visual and textual are blended that a recognizable version of science fiction emerges &ndash; in the same way the magazine featuring the work of fans blurred the boundary between professional and fan. Hence, although the context of my study is 1960s Japan, my research is inseparable from larger investigations of the visual and the textual, the global understanding of science fiction, the relationship between high art and commercial culture, and contemporary media studies. This work is therefore of interest not only to literary science fiction scholars, but also to researchers in critical theory, visual studies, fan studies, and contemporary Japanese culture.</p>

The literary image of the dangerously powerful woman indicates conflict around women's roles in the cultural milieu that gave rise to the text. This interaction between social reality and literary text is most apparent in a culture's legends. Legends may be briefly defined as narratives describing the unordinary to which the audience and/or the teller ascribe the status of reality or at least, plausibility. Underlying the analysis of society-text interaction are two assumptions: (1) the tales regarded by a community as true must at least overtly support the dominant values of that community, and (2) recurring legends point out central concerns of that community. Drawing from Chinese zhiguai (XXXl) collected in the third to sixth centuries and from Sagen compilations made by nineteenth century German folklorists, I argue for the similar function of these texts in the cultural contexts that produced them. There is no question of mutual influence between these two disparate cultural and historical settings. Instead I argue that, cross-culturally, legends featuring female demons and women with supernatural powers indicate conflict around women's roles in family and society. Furthermore, in a given cultural context, the particular characteristics of the supernatural woman in legend provide a mirror for the specific hardships faced and the compensating strategies exercised by women in that cultural system.

This dissertation explores the experience of modernity outside of Europe by considering the portrayal of the railway in selected literature of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. I examine what I see as a mutually constitutive process: the way subjectivity is constructed within modernity, and the way modernity, in turn, transforms as it travels to the “periphery.” My dissertation explores these transformations by looking at the way people inhabit, resist and remake the spaces in and around the railway. Using literary works by Senegalese writer Sembène Ousmane, Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, and selected South Asian writers, I consider the place of aesthetics and representation in this process. I argue that all these authors contribute to a genre that might be called postcolonial modernism, literature from the Third World that is both creating and responding to the advent of modernity. Chapter One provides an overview of theories of modernity. My discussion brings together those critics who theorize modernity primarily within the Western context and those who have opened a discussion of alternative modernities. Chapter Two introduces contemporary theories of space as a way to explore how modernity travels. Looking specifically at spaces of the railway, I consider how modernity is realized through material and imaginative practices. Chapter Three focuses on Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood (1960), and demonstrates how the novel's conflict between generations during the colonial period reveals two relationships to modernity that coexist in the colonial setting. My fourth chapter brings the discussion to the context of South Asia and the literature of partition, including Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan (1956). I argue that these Indian and Pakistani writers represent the railway as a contradictory space traversing a geography fragmented by communal allegiances. Chapter Five analyzes Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet's epic poem Human Landscapes (1950), written during a period of intense national modernization. I present Hikmet's view of modernity as an ambivalent one, representing the altered modes of perception brought by modern technology at the same time underscoring, through his portrayal of the Turkish peasantry, the fact that modernity has not fulfilled its promise of emancipation.

In "Specters of War: Reclamation, Recovery, and Return in Southeast Asian-American Literature and History," I examine life stories, autobiographies, poems, and a film by and about refugees and their children from Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Laos. Engaging with the works of Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Cathy Caruth, and Kathleen Brogan, I argue that the historical experience of war and immigration for Southeast Asian-Americans produces three specific narrative moments: reclamation, recovery, and return. I begin the dissertation by exploring Bakhtinian poetics in the writings of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston A. Baker, Jr., and King-kok Cheung in Chapter 1. Specifically, I use Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of double-voiced discourse to discuss what I call "ethnic intertextuality" in the cultural productions of US ethnic writers. Chapter 2 examines how double-voiced discourse as a textual property allows Cambodian-American writers Loung Ung and Chanrithy Him to re-present the voice of the Cambodian Genocide victims in their testimonial works. A discussion of how and why Le Ly Hayslip and Loung Ung turn to storytelling and activism as vehicles for agency, empowerment, and healing takes place in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 addresses how memories of the traumatic past return to haunt Southeast Asian refugees in Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge and le thi diem thuy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Using the life stories found in Sucheng Chan's Hmong Means Free and Usha Welaratna's Beyond the Killing Fields, I examine the socio-political forces that produce desire for home in Southeast Asian refugees in Chapter 5. I conclude this final chapter with a discussion of the return trips made by Southeast Asian-Americans in Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala and Spencer Nakasako's documentary Refugee.

My project examines the transformations of the Monkey King figure in both Chinese and Asian American literatures and cultures. A protagonist in the sixteenth century classics Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), the Monkey King is still a highly popular cultural figure in China today, thanks to the continuous retellings and rewritings of his story. As the adaptations both in China and the United States make the image of the Monkey King a multifaceted subject, I adopt different research approaches for the varied examples chosen for each chapter. My methodologies range from close readings of literary, visual and graphical works in relation to their broader socio-historical contexts, to a theoretical analysis of the ambivalent nature of the Monkey King figure, the process of translation and representation, as well as identity formation from the approach of performativity and national/cultural myth-making. This project crosses boundaries between premodern and modern Chinese literature, Asian studies and Asian American Studies, and translation studies and media studies. The first chapter focuses on the literary use of the Monkey King in Asian American self-representation. Taking Gene Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese as an example, drawing on Homi Bhabha's discussion of the "fixity" and the "splitting" nature of stereotype, I examine the intricate relationship between monkey, human and god embodied in the Monkey King image. The second chapter borrows the lens of western trickster theories to examine the Chinese mythical character in Journey to the West. I also bring in W.J.T. Mitchell's picture theory in considering the multivalent nature of the Monkey King image and the reasons that this image is most suitable in representing the ethnic American. The third chapter provides a (hi)story of the transformations of the Monkey King image, from a serious friar to a clown, and then from a trickster to a hero. I juxtapose two major changes in the growth of the image: how it is stabilized as a trickster in the Ming prints, and how the trickster is transformed into a hero under Communist politics. The fourth chapter analyzes the representation of the Monkey King image in American media. Focusing on cinematic works such as The Lost Empireand The Forbidden Kingdom, I examine texts from the approach of cross media adaptation and from the viewpoint of chronotope.