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.

<p> In traditional narrative of Chinese literary history, Du Fu (712&ndash;770) is arguably the &ldquo;greatest poet of China,&rdquo; and it was in the Song (960&ndash;1279) that his greatness was finally recognized. This narrative naturally presumes that the real Du Fu in history is completely accessible to us, which is not necessarily true. </p><p> This dissertation provides another perspective to understand Du Fu and the &ldquo;greatness&rdquo; of his poetry. I emphasize that the image of Du Fu that we now have is more of a persona that has been constructed from his available poetic texts. Poets in the Song Dynasty, especially those in the eleventh century, took initiative to construct this persona, and their construction of Du Fu was largely conditioned by their own literary and intellectual concerns. </p><p> The entire dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 investigates how Du Fu&rsquo;s poetic collection emerged. His collection, as it was compiled and edited, not only provided a platform, but also set restrictions, for the construction of Du Fu. Chapter 2 examines how Du Fu used to be remembered before his collection took form. Memory of him before the eleventh century was considerably different from his received image. The remaining chapters focus on three major aspects of Du Fu&rsquo;s persona&mdash;namely his images as a poet-historian, a master of poetic craft, and a Confucian poet&mdash;to analyze how and why Du Fu was constructed as such in the Song. Song poets accepted poetry as a medium loaded with valuable information, and they thus explored Du Fu&rsquo;s poetry for history; they concerned themselves with issues pertaining to poetic craft, and retrospectively looked for examples in Du Fu&rsquo;s poetry as established standards; they, as scholar-officials, committed themselves to the state, and declared Du Fu as their model. In sum, Song poets provided particular readings to Du Fu&rsquo;s particular poems, and claimed these readings as the result of Du Fu&rsquo;s intentional production. Through interpretation of Du Fu&rsquo;s surviving poems, they constructed Du Fu as China&rsquo;s greatest poet.</p>

<p> This dissertation attempts to examine Chinese realist novels (novellas) flourishing in the transitional period between Mao&rsquo;s era and post-Mao era (1976-1984). This period, rarely explored in English-speaking academia, constitutes a critical site to understand the social and cultural transformation from socialist to post-socialist China and to study the &ldquo;individual&rdquo; newly formed in that period whose influence continues to shape today&rsquo;s China. By looking into realist novels, my research attempts to understand this social change and the historical construction of an individual subject distinct from both the human subject conceptualized in the socialist realism in Mao&rsquo;s era and the bourgeois individual in the 19th century European Realism. Realist novels, which opened a textual space for social imagination in a liminal period, undertook the role of creating a life-world of post-socialist China with its mimetic and critical function, thus launching another &ldquo;cultural revolution&rdquo; immediately following the ending of Mao&rsquo;s &ldquo;Cultural Revolution.&rdquo; The main body of my research consists of the analysis of three sub-genres&mdash;Enlightenment fiction (Chapter One), humanist fiction (Chapter Two) and peasant&rsquo;s fiction (Chapter Three), each corresponding respectively to political subject, aesthetic subject and economic subject. The dissertation will show how the enlightenment subject, Kantian subjectivity and &ldquo;persona economicus&rdquo; reinvigorated in these fictional imaginations. However, it was also a period in which all these newly constructed &ldquo;myths&rdquo; of subject were pressed to meet their internal limits which led to their ineluctable dissolution. This was due to the emergence of the &ldquo;wild individual,&rdquo; for example, we can detect the terrifying unrestrained desire of lower class that participated in the discursive formation of the autonomous subject and we can detect the anxiety caused by the accumulation of capital even in the overall optimistic narrative of peasant&rsquo;s literature.</p><p>

<p> This study analyzes "culture" in late colonial Korea, 1937 to 1945, with the methodology of worldly repetition. By embedding culture between quotation marks, I intend to clarify that the object of this study is not an object per se. Korean "culture" is constructed around the three names that the present researcher is barred from objectifying. The names Yi Sang, Ch'oe Chaeso&caron;, and Mun Yebong are not mere indexes of three persons with their particular intrinsic qualities. They are names that represent the Korean culture of the time. However, their representativeness does not mean that they enable the present researcher to reconstruct a general view of Korean culture of the time through them. They are representative to the extent that they allow the present researcher to reflect his own positionality in his research on a past event in history. This reflexive return is induced by the names' essential self-reflexivity; reflections on them are not to be objective if they are aiming at others through the names. The three names are representative of Korean culture of the time to the extent that they are the "origin" of the "culture" that is being formed within the present researcher's time.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duke University, 2006. / (UMI)AAI3250087. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0577. Adviser: Ranjana Khanna.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Chinese, 2007. / Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 26, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0615. Adviser: Bokenkamp R. Stephen.

<p> During the early twentieth century, Japan was modernizing in all areas of science and art, including children&rsquo;s literature. Ogawa Mimei (1882-1961) was a prolific writer who advanced various literary forms such as short stories, poems, essays, children&rsquo;s stories, and children&rsquo;s songs. As a writer, he was most active during the late Meiji (1868-1912) to Taish&omacr; (1912-1926) periods when he was a socialist. During that time, he penned many socialist short stories and children&rsquo;s stories that were filtered through his humanistic, anarchistic, and romanticist ideals. In this thesis, I analyze Mimei&rsquo;s socialist short stories and children&rsquo;s stories written in the 1910s and 1920s. I identify both the characteristics of his writing style and the themes so we can probe Mimei&rsquo;s ideological and aesthetic ideas, which have been discounted by contemporary critics. His socialist short stories challenged the dogmatic literary approach of Japanese proletarian literature during its golden age of the late 1920s and early 1930s. His socialist children&rsquo;s stories also deviated from the standard of Japanese children&rsquo;s literature in the 1950s and 1960s. In this thesis, I break away from the narrow views that confined Mimei to certain literary standards. This thesis is a reevaluation of Mimei&rsquo;s literature on his own terms from a holistic perspective.</p><p>