While in the West poetry has been seen essentially as poiesis, a “making” of a fictionalized, symbolic artifact, and the “objectivity” of the literary text (even more recently the “death of the author”) has been emphasized especially in 20th century theory, in Chinese poetics poetry has always been seen as a verbal expression (yen) of “will” (chih) or inner heart/mind of the poet, and the author’s moral character and specific historical situation have been considered fundamental to the meaning of his works. Through an exploration of this difference, this essay helps to clarify the basic ambiguity of contemporary Western objectivist theories which would foreground only “textuality” and exclude the author from critical consideration. That is, we must be aware of the subtlety and complexity of this issue: the ancient dictum that “style is the man” is of course a fallacy if taken dogmatically, but no more so than the post-structuralist dictum that the author is “dead”, or has dissolved into mere textuality.

This essay explores the interplay, in Kingston’s novels, between criticism (from a Westernized perspective) of traditional Chinese values and customs (e.g. emphasis on filiality, patriarchy, the lower status of women or even misogyny) and the attempt to recover traditional Chinese culture in a social and historical setting (Chinese transplanted in the modern West) where it has been all but lost. It is especially in the author’s playful transformation of (traditional) myths that we find this duality at work. Thrown into a state of rupture or discontinuity with her (Chinese) past, the author is always moving toward the recovery of cultural continuity; her “new” artistic-cultural constructions, while at a slight angle to the traditional one, are essentially still congruent and continuous with it.

Here I extend to a reading of two Non-Western narratives (the Chinese Story of the Stone and Japanese Tale of Genji) and one European narrative (Don Quixote) Blumenberg’s analysis of the modern (Renaissance) concept of “reality”--reality becomes redefined as “actualization of a context in itself,” an infinite, dynamic, future-oriented process which is grounded in human intersubjectivity--and correlative description of the modern novel, which now must reflect upon its own possibility and so “represents nothing but itself.” In all three works we find a new focus on “fictionality” and on the autonomy and free possibilities of human creativity; the question of the corresponding roles of fact and fiction becomes a central narrative as well as epistemological issue in all three litarary traditions, as does the problematic of the ever-increasing gap between individual and collective (intersubjective) experience.

This essay presents a kind of structuralist analysis of the configurations and transformations of the family, with respect to cinematic narrative patterns and ideology, in two Taiwan films of the 1980's. Set in the country, family life in Osmanthus Alley is depicted along a vertical axis (parent-son relationships) and has a diachronic structure, representing the autobiography of the woman protagonist. Set in the modern city (Taipei), family life in The Terrorizer is narrated on a horizontal axis (husband-wife) and has a synchronic structure: the film proceeds not temporally (diachronically) toward closure but by spatially mapping out the complex and fragmented personal relationships of the characters. The latter film especially has the effect of awakening the audience out of their habitual way of perceiving reality.

This paper is a feminist study of Chinese poetic aesthetics. It traces the evolution of the image and “voice” of woman from Han Ballads (where women are more outspoken in refusing unwanted seduction and the “male gaze”) to Southern Dynasty Folk Songs (where women are portrayed as more passive), to palace-style poetry (where women are depicted as refined objects subjugated to male aesthetic desires). The image of women in love, as well as women loved, is also described. For example, in palace-style poetry woman's love is described as relatively suggestive and demure. The author also notes a change in diction and style from the colloquial folk songs to the polished elaborate palace style.

IIn this interview, conducted on “the lazy and mild afternoon of October 15, 1993,” Prof. Sau-ling Wang (U.C., Berkeley) answers questions from a visiting scholar concerning the development of, and rationale for, a relatively new discipline called “Asian American literary studies.” Wang discusses the origin of the Asian American Studies Program at Berkeley (which she coordinates), and reasons why it should not be subsumed under the categories of American literature, or Asian literature. She argues that there really are no “unique themes and characteristics” in Asian American literature, since new readers and scholars will always see a different set of such themes and characteristics.