This thesis investigates the two major conflicting modes of interpretation applied to Mo Yan’s literary texts diachronically and synchronically in order to reveal both the aesthetic imperative and the liberating force of the British and North American literary centers in receiving literature from the periphery. After an introduction to the centers’ disparate responses to the paradigmatic shift of the local Chinese literary trend in the 1980s, the thesis continues with a theoretical discussion on reader-response theory and the uneven power relations between the literary center and the periphery. Jauss’s concept of horizon of expectation and Fish’s interpretive community are adopted to stress openness in interpretation while Casanova’s conceptualization of the world republic of letters provides the framework to study the competition among interpretive communities for the legitimacy of their respective interpretation. The study of the press reception of Mo Yan focuses on the ongoing shift of horizon of expectation from the dominating political and representational mode of interpretation to one that stresses the literary and fictional nature of literature. The study shows that the imperative in the reception of Mo Yan is the extension of the Western cultural hegemony sustained by an Orientalist dichotomy. The academic promotion in the public sphere, however, shows critics’ effort to subvert such domination by suggesting an alternative mode that brings the Chinese literary context to bear on the interpretation. In addition to this, Mo Yan’s strategic negotiation with the dominating mode of reception is analysed in my close reading of POW!. At the end of the thesis, I call for general readers to raise the awareness of the hegemonic tendency of any prevailing mode of interpretation. By asserting a certain distance, readers enable the openness in interpretation and hence possible communication among different communities.

The purpose of this case study was to examine the effectiveness of a technique known as re-creation on student writing abilities in ENG 104 section 95 during the spring semester of 1992. Re-creation, already used almost exclusively in England and Australia, invites a writer to divulge his or her personal interpretation of a literary text by rewriting given aspects of it. In section 95, the instructor devoted the entire range of assignments to re-creative writing tasks, using four dramatic scripts and the motion pictures that had been adapted from them as literary texts. The instructor carefully developed re-creative writing assignments and a reasonable criteria with which to grade them. He closely monitored how the students adapted to re-creative writing, and discovered that four students exemplified the main different styles of writing that emerged from re-creation. The case study does indicate that all of the twenty-one students coulddo the work that re-creation involves; some experienced only minor successes with it, but other students, including some top achievers who would probably have done well in any writing class, found broad new avenues for creative expression of their personal responses to literature. / Department of English

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. English, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 10, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 194-203). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 214 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-214). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 352-362). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 352-362). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 335-406). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of English, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation (D.M.A.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2009. / Directed by Robert Wells; submitted to the School of Music. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Apr. 29, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1998. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 11, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ronald L. Strickland (chair), Jonathan M. Rosenthal, Cecil Giscombe. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-208) and abstract. Also available in print.