The focus of this essay is the European roman à clef and the Chinese yingshe method of composition in fiction. This essay argues that, comparing to the European roman à clef, the yingshe has played a central role in the overall development of traditional Chinese novel composition. The historical referentiality of yingshe makes traditional Chinese novel different from its counterpart in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European tradition. The poetics of historical referentiality distinguishes the analogical imagination from the mimetic imagination. This new perspective in viewing traditional Chinese novel as a special kind of “roman a clef’ has important implications that will throw light on the nature and characteristics of both European and Chinese novels in a more universal context.

The concept of the subject-in-process Kristeva develops in La révolution du langage poétique belongs to those theories of the subject that try to understand the subject as a revolutionary subject. Theories of that type usually are formed by three moves. In the first move, the subject is positioned as the victim of some oppressive structure that keeps the subject from being or becoming what it really is or what it deserves to be. In the second move, the subject’s potential for becoming aware of that oppressive situation and finding ways to overturn it is developed. The third move is a supplement. Such a supplement is necessary, because the conceptual resources of such theories seem to be exhausted at the very point where the overturning of the oppressive structure has been achieved. There does not seem to be a bridge from a theory of the subject as a revolutionary subject to a strong theory of the subject as a social agent. The classical version of a supplementing third move is a philosophy of history. The theory of the subject is positioned within a philosophy of history as a frame. Reinterpreted within such a frame, the revolutionary subject becomes a historical agent, bringing about the form of society that comes next—according to the respective philosophy of history. Kristeva’s theory of the subjectin-process excludes a solution of that kind. Her third move attempts to solve the problem by description. A segment of the present is singled out as a world of subjects-in-process already existing or at least in the making. Although for a brief period only, Kristeva saw in the Chinese Cultural Revolution the potential of such a new world and the women of China as its first messengers.

This paper studies the translations of Charles Baudelaire in China between 1921 and 1925. It uses the translated poems of Baudelaire as an axis to foreground the crucial role the poet played in writing part of the history of Modern Chinese Literature in question. It reexamines the literary activities that involved the codification of the New Literature envisaged by the literary revolutionists and how this new poetics competed with others for dominance. Baudelaire's two collections of poems, Les fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris, which differ drastically in their form and diction while sharing the dubious label of Decadence, were particularly sensitive to the conflicting literary discourses in China which focused mainly on the vernacular problem, the viability of traditional versification, and the function of literature in society. Different poems were appropriated by different translators and literary institutions to play the literary politics of inclusion and exclusion. The phenomenon of Baudelaire fighting against himself not only reveals the irony of literary fortune, but also lays bare the manipulative nature of translation which targets on specific agendas.

Mahua wenxue in this paper is regarded as a minor literature—a peripheral literature practicing a major language, though Chinese Malaysian writers also express their literary in English and Malay. The emergence of classical Mahua literature in the nineteenth century immigrant community was the result of contacts and interference between the source and target literary systems. Likewise, as a dependent literary system, the vernacular Mahua wenxue, in its initial phase, modeled closely on modern vernacular Chinese literature, since the emerging literature was weak and young, without its own canon, repertoire, and norms. Such a Chinese connection helped the local Chinese literature flourish in the 1920's.

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In this interview, conducted on August 2, 1996, Professor Milan V. Dimić (U of Alberta) expresses his impression and personal overview of the evolution and development of the discipline of Comparative Literature during the last thirty years and its present situation. He discusses the critique of Comparative Literature, its marginalization, and its future, the conflictual debates about the humanities and culture in general in North America, the power struggle inside departments, and the rift between American scholarship and its counterparts in other countries.