A central technique in Rushdie’s Shame is the use of incongruous cross-cultural perspectives as a means of shaking readers loose from their unconscious social or political assumptions. One obvious example of the technique is the character Sufiya Zinobia, a creature clearly more suited to ancient fairy tale or myth but displaced in Rushdie’s novel into “the heart of the respectable world.” A symbol particularly of the burden of guilt and shame imposed on women by traditional societies, Sufiya comes to represent everything that is “consigned to peripheries” for the sake of propriety or appearance. Because of this concern with repression or marginalization, a central theme in Shame is that of the frontier or border, of cultural transition or adaptation. Though he acknowledges the drawbacks, Rushdie seems to regard cultural displacement or “off-centring” as basically a positive experience because it helps to free people of repressive traditional concepts like that of honor and shame. In fact, Rushdie’s own work is an excellent demonstration of some of the moral and imaginative benefits that can accrue from having been “borne-across or trans-lated.” One obvious result of his cultural displacement is his unusual knack for metaphor or pun, for what Kenneth Burke refers to as “perspective by incongruity.” Another result is the playful irreverence with which he treats ‘established literary.conventions, including those governing linear narration and distinctions of reality and fiction. Particularly effective as “off-centring” devices are those passages in which Rushdie reflects “metafictionally” on the real-life sources of his novel, on the ways in which, as they are incorporated into a work of art, the materials of real life are imaginatively displaced or “refracted.”

In China Men, Kingston synthesized mythical figures from various classical and popular Chinese literary sources into her own family background. One chapter of the novel, however, appropriates Defoe’s fictional character Robinson Crusoe, transforming him into a Chinese figure. Kingston’s use of this character (whose British identity she conceals) to reinforce her praise, in the novel, of the perseverance of Chinese-American men who suffered from oppression in 19th century American society, is inappropriate. Not only was Defoe a British racist who spoke of the inferiority of 18th centruy Chinese culture; the primary qualities of Kingston’s exemplary “China men”--patience, endurance, ability to overcome hardships through social solidarity are quite different from Crusoe’s (Western male) scientific ingenuity, self-reliance and extreme individualism.

This paper critically treats Chia Pao-yü’s dream in chapter 5 of Dream of the Red Chamber in which he first visits the “Land of Illusion.” In the first part, the author reviews the development of traditional Chinese dream theory from its earliest literary sources on, discussing selective but representative texts. These developments are further compared to modern Western dream theory, psychological, physiological and psychophysiological. In the second part, this theory is then applied to the dream showing Ts’ao Hstieh-ch'in’s familiarity with the tradition and how this explicates certain thematic developments in the novel. The dream, as the last episode of the prologue, summarizes what has developed before and points to future developments. It further Supports the central theme which explores the illusory and the real. And finally it shows that myth, dream and psychology are skillfully integrated into one complex whole.

In current cultural criticism, a “mutant” text, one which identifies its “center” with the pedagogically instituted Other and so is “outside of itself,” is usually assumed to be better than a “straight” text, which represses the unassimilable dark Other. The Hongloumeng proclaims itself at the very beginning to be “minor” literature, a message inscribed on a rejected stone and brought by a daoist apprentice from the periphery of the cosmos back to the center. In the context of Chinese culture, colonization of minor discourses is historically instanced by the Chinese transformation of Indian Buddhism and by the hybridization of philosophical daoism with folk supernaturalism and with Confucian elements. This same process of colonization is clearly operative in the rise to canonicity of Hongloumeng, a work which seems to have determined through its “mutant” advocacy of alterity it own history of reception. It seems unlikely that, as long as we are fixated on a will to canonicity which measures a text’s greatness by the fullness of its cultural content, we can retrieve the original mutant position of an untainted Buddhist discourse.

This paper begins by comparing and contrasting the views of Plato and Lao-tzu regarding literature. It aims to determine if the views of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu are compatible with the Western assumption that literature is the representation of reality (the mimetic view). After then comparing the “prophetic” mood of Chuang-tzu and Gibran, the paper concludes that typical Taoist writings go beyond the physical world rather than imitate true-life experience. Realistic (mimetic) description would hinder the Taoist Romantic consciousness from its goal of mystical grasp of Tao. Literature is self-revelation of Tao, rather than mere external reproduction (or imitation).

This paper looks at whether, and how interdisciplinary approaches to literature are possible, exploring the parallel phenomena of literary theories/models and the scientific paradigms which have taken shape over the past few decades. The first part of the paper attempts to theorize the necessity of transdisciplinary approaches and to redefine literature’s position I in the post-modern condition and in post-literary culture. In the second part, an “ecological hermeneutic” is proposed as praxis for the theoretical claim argued in the first part. The paradigm linking sceince and literature voiced is that of chaos in the sciences realized as nonlinear dynamics in complex systems and in literature as the critical phenomena of the postmodern condition.

This paper promises an analytic, empirical, synthetic investigation of the theory of organic unity from the Chinese, Western, and contemporary perspectives. Examining and comparing the views of writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Coleridge, Schlegel, Collingwood, Yeats, Derrida, Wang Kuo-wei, Lu Chi, Po Chu-i, and especially Liu Hsieh, the organic theory of literature is defined and defended. The author points out that deconstruction theory does not totally exclude the existence of some unified center. The paper concludes that “it is the urge to construct an intelligible whole that makes possible not only imaginative literature but also other forms of human civilization.”

Chu Kuang-ch’ien was an important “medium” through which the Chinese intellectual world absorbed Western aesthetic values and concepts. But he was never a passive medium: he always interpreted Western aesthetic theories from the standpoint of traditional Chinese thought and the concrete practice of Chinese art and literature. Almost all his writings refer implicitly or explicitly to the concept of “aesthetic experience,” and here Croce’s theory of intuition undoubtedly had a great influence. While Chu combines this with Bullough’s notion of “psychical distance” and the European concept of “empathy,” he interprets both of these in terms of (Crocian) intuition of form. But he cannot accept Croce’s exclusion from art of a communicative association of ideas and of value; his distinction between aesthetic experience and artistic activity inevitably implied the reinsertion of morality within the field of art. Thus Chu was never really a follower of Croce; it seems he first popularized Croce’s thought in order to better clarify his own position at some distance from it.

The author begins by introducing Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic model of semiosis, and then tries to apply it to the poetry of Hu Shih (especially his Experimental Poems) and his idea of the “Eight Don’ts.” There follows a discussion of the possible influence of Amy Lowell’s Imagism and Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads on Hu Shih. The author believes that the formation of Hu Shih’s “Eight Don'ts” has almost nothing to do with Imagism in spite of certain similarities.

This essay discusses Mao Tun’s role as “messenger of the gods” in bringing foreign mythology to China. In 1926 Mao Tun’s Cosmogonic Myths was its creation and nature myths of primitive Non-Arian (e.g. Australian aboriginal) and Arian (Indian, Nordic) societies. Here I analyze, by looking closely at selected passages in Lang and their “counterparts” in Mao Tun‘s Cosmogonic Myths and later works, the extent to which in each case Mao Tun is closely translating or freely adaption, adding (throuth translation) his own original touches to the stories. Of particular interest are the Chinese scholar’s treatment of Greek and Nordic myths, where the central issue becomes: to what degree (and for what cultural reasons) does any modern translator/interpreter, whether Lang or Mao Tun, conserve or change, perhaps rationalize, the original religious/philosophical/poetic thought-patterns in his rendering of ancient myths?