This article examines fourteen out of the twenty-five short stories in Lu Xun’s A Call to Arms and Wandering, which exhibit a travel structure; these stories divide into three main types, namely: (1) a journey to one’s native land, (2) a visit to a remote town, and (3) a walk in the village street. The first category is autobiographical and uses first person narrative while the second and the third use a more objective, reporting style with third person narrative. Most of the travellers act as observers on unfamiliar trips of strange happenings, decadence in society and a diseased people. The stories of the first category reflect old Ching, the past society, the old intellects while the other two depict the start and illusions of China’s Revolution.

Here two “feminist” novels from very different cultures--Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Li Ang’s The Butcher's Wife--are compared by means of a Freudian perspective. Freud’s id or pleasure principle has a dual form: the synthesizing life-instincts of self-preservation, tied to sexual pleasure, and the disintegrating death instincts which lead to self-destruction. In Flaubert’s novel Emma Bovary’s needs are both spiritual (“romantic”) and sexual, but through the stages of her disillusionment she is reduced to a self-destructive sexual animal; that is, her destructive tendencies overwhelm her rational self and she commits suicide. Lin Shi, the butcher's wife of Li Ang’s novel, is on the other hand the innocent victim of her pig-like husband, himself a creature of raw sexual desire who inflicts pain on his wife in the act of love-making. Unlike Emma Bovary, Lin Shi has no chance to connect sex with pleasure or love. Thus Lin Shi is led by her life-preserving instincts to destroy the husband--butchering him like a” pig--who is destroying her; she however must pay for this crime with her life. In both novels we may conclude that Thanatos has triumphed over Eros.

Here I show how two contemporary Taiwanese women’s novels, which depict the role of women in traditional Chinese society, ultimately call our attention to the perplexing question of women’s relation to language, to the signifying process governed by patriarchal rules. But while T'i Hung, in Hsiao Li-hung’s The Lane of Sweet Osmanthus, gains a certain power over language through her desire to author her own life story, Lin Shih of Li Ang’s The Murder of a Husband never gains such power. Rather, silence and inarticulate cries are Lin Shih’s only defense against the sexual violence of her husband and of the public (patriarchal) discourse. Perhaps a truly “feminine writing” is, as Cixous says, an “impossibility that will . . . always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system . . . . ”

This essay situates D. H. Hwang's “deconstructivist” Madame Butterfly, a play which critiques sexual imperialism by politically. re-visioning the archetypal East-West romance perpetuated by Puccini's opera, at the intersection of feminist politics, postcolonial discourse and deconstructivist theory. My reading of the play intends to broaden the scope of feminist theorization of cross-gender dressing by analyzing the trope of “cross-cultural dressing” in its imperialist context. On the one hand an essentialist view of cross-dressing maintains the binary opposition of clothes/body by taking “body” as the ultimate reality that can be disclosed after removing layers of cultural and gender camouflage. On the other hand, a constructivist view tends to undermine the binary structures of body/clothes and West/East by exploring the construction of (a fictional) “Orientalism” under the western masculine gaze (Said) and of (a fictional) “sexuality” through the heterosexual matrix (Butler), thus laying bare the possibility of a role reversal in which West becomes East and man becomes woman (or vice versa).

Here, by way of testing its interpretive efficacy in the 20th centruy, Liu Hsieh’s classic theory of literary criticism presented in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons is experimentally applied to the contemporary short story “Ashes” by Pai Hsien-yung. Liu Hsieh’s theory gives us a way of linking objectively and comprehensively at a literary work through its “6 points”--wei-ti (theme/genre/form), shih-i (content), chih-tz‘u (wording/rhetoric), kung-shang (rhyme/rhythm/meter), 67 cheng (orthodoxy/novelty with reference to contemporary texts) and t’ung-pien (traditionality/originality). These six interpretive parameters do indeed seem to provide a clear and balanced way of looking at, and evaluating, “Ashes”: according to this framework the story, itself concerned with the need for a return to traditional Chinese culture and so embodying a balance of comemporary and classical elements in Chinese culture, receives a high rating.

In this essay the author first shows that Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and Foucault's theory of the power struggle of discourses are both congruent with Moi’s androgyny or “deconstructed” stage three feminism in which gender-identity is seen to be contingent, finally indeterminate. Then, against this theoretical background, Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ tragic drama is interpreted in terms of carnival as a “minimally ritualized antiritual, a festive celebration of the other,” and in terms of Bataille’s Dionysian “orgy of annihilation”: in proclaiming the joy of rebirth through the “sacrificial” death of her husband Clytemnestra goes beyond herself, breaks through her homogeneous gender identity by liberating heterogeneous elements, her “other.” Finally, the Chinese Lizo-chai chih-yi is seen, against this same interpretive framework, as a hybrid genre, a site of contention between text and subtext or dominant discourse and counter-discourse: its dialogism of discourses reveals a heterogeneity, an alternative world--in terms of values and beliefs--to that of traditional Confucianism.

This paper begins by establishing that eating and drinking are important motifs in Western and Chinese literature, by reviewing examples from Western authors such as Homer, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, and Chinese novels such as The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Golden Lotus, and (most important) The Quest for Love of Lao Lee by Lao She (pen name of Shu Ch’ing-ch’un). The author says that “throughout the novel food usually represents either an escape from unpleasant thoughts or compensation for a disagreeable situation. It seldom represents positive pleasure as it does in Lao She’s English precursors Fielding and Dickens.” The paper concludes that Lao She probably intended the characters in his novel to apparently not derive pleasure from eating as a reminder to his readers of the meaningless routine of the characters’ lives in Peking.

This paper reviews and evaluates the papers of the Sixth Quadrennial International Comparative Literature Cenference in the Republic of China. The present congress affirms the wedding of Western criticism to Eastern literatures. Whether this is a case of cultural colonialism requires considerable discussion. The conference as a whole lost sight of the major concern of the nature of comparative literature as a discipline. Many .papers failed to consider the paradigms of study, internationalism, literariness and relationships, the main components of definitions of comparative literature; some papers confined themselves to a single literature and others only treated writing in the abstract without examining any literary text. In the future more attention needs to be given to the teaching of comparative literature.