Whether and how one should apply Western literary theory in analyses of Chinese fiction has been a major debate among sinologists in the West. I argue for the validity of adopting a universal historical perspective and judiciously employing Western literary theory to analyze Chinese works, while taking cultural specificity into consideration. Warning about poststructuralist theory, I show how its pretensions have been exposed by recent critics. I suggest that the criteria for choosing theories should be that they are sound and testable, they focus on illuminating the literary work, and they can be effectively utilized in the analysis of Chinese texts. Three theoretical approaches are suggested for critics in sinology and Sino-Western comparative studies. Recommending inductive reasoning as well as carefully tailored approaches suited to a given context, I propose consciously adhering to a methodology based on critical analysis and evidential research.

Tang Xian-zu (湯顯祖), a Shakespeare of the Orient, is famous by his Yu-ming Tang Si-Meng (玉茗堂四夢, The Four Dreams of Yu-ming Hall). Among them, Mu-dan Ting (牡丹亭 , The Peony Pavilion) has been considered as the best to represent the playwright’s unique philosophy of ging-zhi (情至) which is translated as “a philosophy of love or feelings” according to most scholars. They basically treat the female protagonist Du Li-niang (杜麗娘) as the embodiment of Tang’s philosophy. However, few have ever read the play from a feminist perspective. Therefore, I will read the play from a semiotic feminist perspective and argue that the play actually conveys a tragic sense about the misery of women during the Ming dynasty in China. My paper concentrates on reading the female protagonist as a sign for cultural associations. Such a reading will reveal that although projecting the playwright’s psyche, the defiant female protagonist is an idealized fiction rather than a reliable representative of women in the patriarchal Ming society. Evidence from historical female reader’s responses to the play and authentic tragedies of women because of Neo-Confucian patriarchal ideology in the culture will be incorporated to support my argument.

What did Chin Sheng-t’an do in his commentary on the Shui-hu chuan? Is it a systematic theory of the novel or a mere idiosyncratic reading of the text? Through a comparative study of Chin Sheng-t’an’s and Roland Barthes’s running commentaries on the novels they studied, as well as other modern Western theorists’ articulation of what constitute a literary theory and an interpretation theory, this article offers a meta-discourse on the nature and status of Chin’s commentarial discourse. It dissects Chin’s commentary into two components: a structuralist phase of theory formulation and a post-structuralist phase of critical interpretation. Via such an anatomy, it comes to the conclusion that although Chin Sheng-t’an’s reading of the Shui-hu chuan is indeed iconoclastic and rather stretched, the descriptive apparatus and reading strategy that he designed are effective and theoretically sound, and thus his commentary is a systematic theory of the novel.

Hong gaoliang jiazu (The Red Sorghum Family) chronicles the romance and heroic deeds of the narrator's ancestors over a period of raging banditry and anti-Japanese resistance. The deliberate omission in the narrative of the bitter class struggle in the Maoist era represses a historical experience, with its anguish deeply buried beneath the imaginary form of fantasy construction. The narrative invested with the heroic grandeur of the peasant class is interpreted in an allegorical framework in order to illuminate its distorted representation of history and the hidden agenda of social criticism.

This paper proposes some reflections on two brief texts from the Yang Sheng Chu (養生主), the third chapter of the Chuang-tzu (莊子). The main focus is the metaphor of fire and firewood, understood as trying to articulate two intertwined forms of ending and coming to an end. Making firewood has to do with the effort of reaching the universal. The metaphor of fire stands for a reality beyond the universal, a reality in constant change—like the shape of fire. This reality must not be seen as independent from the universal. There cannot be any fire without firewood that keeps it burning, and there cannot be any particular beyond the universal, nor any form of access to it, without turning towards the universal. Looking for the universal, the paper concludes, has to be done, and it is the only thing that can be done. What can be done indeed is not everything. Everything else, however, requires that everything that can be done is done. This is perhaps the basic idea the metaphor of fire and firewood tries to explicate.

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