One of the most startling stories in the history of Chinese fiction is “In Jiangdu, A Filial Daughter-in-Law Offers Her Body To Be Butchered,” written by the late-Ming writer Xi Langxian. This paper compares Langxian’s story of martyrdom with its earlier sources, showing his successful revisions. Langxian endows his characters with complicated desires, intentions, and motivations, highlights the “embodiment” of the heroine, and incorporates into his story the socio-economic, historical, political, and supernatural dimensions. I contend that because it involves a complete denial of human dignity, the sense of the grotesque—enhanced by the underlying structure of money and exchange—is by no means “carnivalesque” and positive, as is the Bakhtinian grotesque. I also argue against the contention that the story contains subversive elements and there is a disjuncture between the heroic and the comic subversions. Placed in its proper historical and hermeneutic contexts, Langxian’s story does not undercut the protagonist’s heroism, nor does it fail artistically because of its comic elements. In fact, the complexities of the story are evidence not of artistic failure, but of authorial control of several levels of meaning and patterns which work to reinforce the poignancy of the heroine’s tragedy and evoke complex reader responses. The story serves the functions of didacticism, “entertainment,” and expressing admiration for a paragon of virtue as well as the anxieties of the male elite. It surpasses many other moral tales because it brings the issue of gender sharply into focus and enhances the readers’ cognitive understanding of human nature.

The female-persona lyric is a newly defined genre by the present study, although the “speaking on-behalf-of the other” mode (代言體) has been the significant form of the lyrics of boudoir complaint (閨怨詩) in classical Chinese poetry. The genre is located in the space between the male poet and the female persona he assumes and is take as an instance in which the boundary between the feminine and the masculine is crossed over. The main ideas exercised in my argument are the concept of androgyny in contemporary feminist criticism and the Chinese philosophy of t’ai-chi (太極) —the focus is the psychoanalytic modeling function of the genre. Form this psychoanalytic perspective, the female-persona lyric is viewed as a simultaneous presentation of different voices: the voice of human species (the voice of the pre-Oedipal and the imaginary), the voice of gender (the lack and the discontentment of the masculine in the patriarchal society), and the voice of sympathy and guilt, alienation, and social injustice in short, the voice of an androgynous subject, which always yearns for going beyond the gender.

When translating from English into Chinese, it is often necessary to alter the word order of the original so as to comply with the Chinese syntactical requirements. In literature, however, word order (including longer units such as clauses) may be of great significance to the work. In poetry, for example, to preserve the sequence of images or logical connections, the translation may have to follow closely the word order of the original. Since drama is an art of timing, it is crucial when certain information is revealed, for it often dictates the expression and gesture of the actor, contributes to characterization, or controls the interaction between characters. When Hamlet discusses the art of the theater with the players, he stresses the importance of suiting “the action to the word, the word to the action.” In translating a playscript, the connection between the two must indeed give us pause. This paper tries to illustrate the importance of following the original word order and thereby preserving the dramatic effect; certain passages from Hamlet will be examined along with their Chinese translations by such distinguished translators as Zhu Shenghao, Liang Shih-ch’iu, and Bian Zhilin.

This article is a brief but, interesting look at developments in music (and architecture and art) in relation to canon (its constituents-order and multiplicity) and the hermeneutic effects of Sinologists looking at Chinese canonical texts and history books as canon. Developments away from explicit canon to a framelessness (music as weather—process no beginning, middle or end) still have an implicit echo of purpose and still recover the same sacred.

In this extensive interview with a scholar from Taiwan, conducted through correspondence from November 1994 to March 1995, Maxine Hong Kingston answers questions concerning Asian American literature, her relationship with Chinese literature, the transmission from talk-stories to written texts, and the recent performance of The Woman Warrior: A Girlhood among Ghosts on stage (a dramatic adaptation [by Deborah Rogin] based on The Woman Warrior and China Men). She also responds to ethnocentric critics, discusses issues about cultural identity and hybridity, and mentions various responses to her works, including those from her parents.

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