The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, I observe that “inter-characterization” is one of the most important features of characterization discourse in the traditional Chinese novel. This feature is related to the holistic nature of traditional Chinese thought and especially Confucian “philosophical anthropology.” With illustrative examples from Hung-lou meng, I discuss two basic kinds of inter-characterization: “immediate-characterization” and “postponed inter-characterization.” The second part is an analysis of the technique of psycho-narration in the traditional Chinese novel, again taking Hung-lou meng as an example. First I briefly discuss the significance of the continuum concept of hsü (non-being) and shih (being) and the unique idea of hsin (mind) in traditional Chinese culture. Then I proceed to analyze how psycho-narration is rendered in Hung-lou meng in terms of these concepts. The central idea that is behind almost every argument in this paper is the interdependent nature of the relation between the “self” and the “other” and the profound awareness of the importance of “relationality”’ in traditional Chinese culture in general and in its novelistic discourse in particular. The paper is only a preliminary attempt towards a poetics of characterization in the traditional Chinese novel. Many conclusions drawn in the paper are, to say the least, tentative, and have to be modified and validated by a much fuller study which examines more works in that tradition.

This essay, borrowing from Bloom’s theory that “strong poets” purposely misread one another “so as to clear imaginative space for themselves,” attempts an intertextual interpretation of Eileen Chang’s The Golden Cangue as a “te-writing” of the classic novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. While the latter is primarily social, political and psychological, and centers on the moral evil of the female character Wang Hsi-feng, The Golden Cangue is primarily psychological and centers on the abnormal personality of Wang’s counterpart, Ch’i-ch’ao, whose mad jealousy is seen to stem from her own repressed sexual desire. Also, while material wealth is seen as something finally illusory from the metaphysical (Buddhist-Taoist) perspective of the classic novel, it is seen as an actuality, a real force of (social and psychological) corruption in Chang’s work. The conclusion here is that The Golden Cangue is not successful as a work of art, since it lacks what Benjamin feels is essential: “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” That is, while Dream of the Red Chamber has the sense of a specific and real historical ‘setting, its “rewritten’’ contemporary offspring, or rather “shadow,” lacks the sense of totality (“relations to the others’’)—since Chang’s misreading is too limited, based only on that frag- ment of the original which she saw clearly—and of (specific) history.

The Chinese long vernacular hsiao-shuo (chang-hui hsiao-shuo 章回小說 ) has often been called the Chinese novel and regarded as the Chinese literary equivalent of the Western novel. Both modes of writing are prose narratives of considerable length and wrizten in a language other than the prestigious classical literary language. Beyond that, however, the Chinese long vernacular hsiao-shuo and the Western novel seem to have very little in common. In terms of narrative structure, the attitude toward traditional material, characterization, and language behavior, the Chinese mode of writing obviously shows a narrative orientation quite different from that of the Western novel. Some critics try to explain the peculiar features of this Chinese narrative form in terms of the Chinese yin-yang theory (Plaks, Hegel); others stress the connection between the Chinese long vernacular hsiao-shuo and early story-tellers’ performances (Eoyang). So far, very few critics have bothered to examine the narrative mode’s ontological roots in the hsiao-shuo tradition. I shall argue that the fundamental difference between the Western and the Chinese narrative modes is essentially a difference between the ontological meanings of the terms that designate these two modes of writing. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the significance of the Chinese long vernacular siao-shuo’s ontological roots and the textual consequences that they entails.

This essay takes a close look at the state of Chinese poetry in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, as defined by the on-going debate and interaction between two aesthetic schools: poets who emphasized substance, clear classical style and scholarship, and those who emphasized original style and expression, startling diction and the importance of poetic form. Representatives of the first group include Chao Ping-wen and Wang Jo-hsu, and of the second, Li Ch’un-fu and Lei Yuan. One way to interpret the aesthetic and literary critical issue here is as a productive tension between late T’ang Hsi-k’un style poetry, stressing originality for its own sake and striking turns of phrase, and the Chiang-hsi style of composition, initially inspired by the precepts of Huang T’ing-chien. Poems written in the latter style, with their clean classical form, tended however to degenerate into mechanical, formulaic exercises in versification.

Sincerity and impersonality are central concepts in classical Chinese and Japanese poetics. In moder Western criticism, however, only impersonality has been affirmed, notably by Keats, Eliot and Pound, as an essential quality of a poet of great achievement. Sincerity, on the other hand, is mistaken as “biographical truthfulness,” and since sincerity as such is contrary to the concept of impersonality, it is rightly invalidated as a criterion of judgment. After René Wellek’s emphatic negation of sincerity as having nothing to do with poetic excellence, the misunderstanding persists and critics generally shy away from using the term. Confusion arises mainly from the use of ‘sincerity’ or ‘sincere’ in the practical sense of fidelity to ‘intensity of emotion or intense, lived experience (Erlebnis). Indeed, “intense, lived experience” is irrelevant to literary excellence unless the raw experience is aesthetically processed in the alembic of his creative mind. Instead of “biographical truthfulness,” sincerity in Romantic poetics and its direct counterparts, ch’eng and makoto in classical Chinese and Japanese poetics, mean accurate or unwarped reproduction of the author’s “Snterpreted reality” or “felt truth.’ What is called, “felt truth’ can be illustrated by Su Tung-po’s notion of “Shaving the made bamboo in the mind,” and acquiring the necessary technique to represent it. The term is significant in that it encompasses two dimensions of unity: the primary or natural unity that knits the author, the work, and the universe together, and the secondary or formal unity of the work itself. Ruskin’s “concept of “pathetic fallacy” and Wordsworth’s notion about “poetic diction’ may all be understood as instances of lack of sincerity. They become “glossy and unfeeling” because they do not command these two dimensions of unity. Basho’s fuga no makoto literally means the sincerity of the haiku mind, or in Makoto Ueda’s words, the “true ‘poetic spirit.’’ In essence it is the poetic imagination that transforms with the evolution of the four seasons and acts according to the principle of the unchangeable (fueki) and the temporal (ryuko). It is the creative mind in control of what Liu Hsieh calls t'ung-pien (tradition and change)—a mind that, purged of egotistical considerations, has become a thoroughfare of immanent principles, and capable of adapting itself to changing circumstances.

Conducted in March 1990 and revised by the interviewee Wolfgang Iser himself, this interview (with its eighteen questions and answers) is the result of a dynamic interaction in English between two students of literature who, though from as diverse backgrounds as Chinese and German, share some common interests. Dialogic by nature, it remarks Iser’s development as a German intellectual after World War II, his various “intellectual debts,” his position in the so-called Constance School, his relationship with and judgment of the English and American academic circle of literary criticism and theory, his. significance as the founder and proponent of the theory of aesthetic response and in the multifarious camp of Reader Response Criticism, and his progress during the last two decades from the theory of aesthetic response to literary anthropology.