contemporary foreign literature
TRANSCRIPT
CONTEMPORARY FOREIGN LITERATURE
Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring 2015)
ABSTRACTS
Knowledge, Humanity, and Ethics in Margaret Edson’s W;t
ABSTRACT: In her play W;t, Margaret Edson brings to light the social and ethical
problems emerging from the rupture of multifaceted linkage between knowledge and
true humanity in a modern world that has increasingly alienated the sciences from the
humanities. Mankind’s insatiable pursuit of knowledge has not only deprived medical
science of its intrinsic humanitarian concern, but it has also subjugated literary studies
to formulaic approaches traditionally typical of scientific research, thus reducing
humanities to something more and more detached and apathetic. The play explores
the interaction between medicine and literature, the two major intrinsically human
provinces of intellectual endeavors. Set in a hospital and invisibly in a university, the
play dramatizes how modern minds have been weakened by the unhealthy imbalance
between overarching rationality and underdeveloped sensibility. Reckless pursuit of
knowledge, as the play reveals, never contributes to human happiness, and true
wisdom only comes from a fusion of knowledge with love.
Keywords: Margaret Edson, W;t, knowledge, humanity, ethics
Author: Zhu Lihang <[email protected]> is a Ph.D. candidate of comparative
literature and world literature at Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
(430079), and an associate professor of the School of International Education,
Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China (310018). Her academic interest is
in European and American literature.
Staging the “Subtle”:
A Review of 2014 Pulitzer-Winning Drama The Flick
ABSTRACT: Annie Baker’s The Flick, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama,
seems mediocre or “gentle” because of its ordinary setting, flat characters and
uneventful plot. Set in a run-down movie theatre, the play nevertheless tells a subtle
story about cinema through theatre by integrating the two art forms. Its metatheatrical
techniques that skillfully weave cinematic concerns with theatrical performance serve
to intensify the dramatic conflict within the play and indeed underscore its artistic
value. What’s more, by dramatizing the transformation in film projection from 35mm
to digital, the playwright visualizes the contest between traditional art and modern
technology, and explores social problems in this rapidly changing era.
Keywords: Annie Baker, The Flick, cinema, theatre, metatheatre
Authors: Chen Aimin <[email protected]> is a professor of English at School of
Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
(210023). His recent research interest is in American drama at the turn into the 21st
century. Wang Ruiyang <[email protected]> is an MA candidate, majoring in
British and American literature.
Rehabilitation of Clichés in Kay Ryan’s Poetry
ABSTRACT: Kay Ryan, the sixteenth poet laureate of the United States from 2008
through 2010, is often compared to Emily Dickinson for being an “outsider” to
mainstream poetry circles. For Ryan, poetry is a form of superior entertainment and it
is those funny elements that animate poetry. Ryan’s poems revisit clichés or idiomatic
expressions by examining their beauty and mining the cracks in common human
experiences. This article explores Ryan’s playful art of rehabilitating clichés in her
poetry and, by probing into such poems, examines the playfulness of contemporary
intellectuals.
Keywords: Kay Ryan, rehabilitation of clichés, playfulness
Author: Lü Aijing <[email protected]> is an associate professor at Hunan University
of Science and Technology, Xiangtan, China (411100), specializing in modern and
contemporary English poetry.
A Postmodern World of Fragmented Truth:
Robert Coover’s Cubic Metafiction
ABSTRACT ： A prolific contemporary American writer, Robert Coover is
well-known for his metafictional writings featuring postmodern narrative strategies
such as fragmentation, collage, authorial intrusion and parody. His “cubic stories”,
especially, tend to confuse the readers with a nonconventional narrative style. These
experimental works, though seemingly unrealistic, demonstrate the fictionality of
literature and paradoxically tell what truly happens in the postmodern world. Despite
their offbeat unrealistic veils, Coover’s cubic stories have in fact created a
soul-touching world of alternative reality.
Keywords: Robert Coover, fragmentation, metafiction, postmodernism
Author: Li Lin <[email protected]> is a lecturer of English at School of Foreign
Studies, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China (100083). Her
research areas include English literatures and comparative literature.
The Post-9/11 Spectacle in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
ABSTRACT: Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, a post-9/11 classic, showcases the
post-9/11 spectacle from various perspectives. The terrorist attack on the Twin Towers
is represented as a spectacular display, a carnival, and a symbol of terror externalized,
which produces traumatic effects on survivors and all the others, shocking them into
reflecting on the nexus between globalization and terrorism. Globalized violence
constitutes a semantic field in which different discourses come into conflict, while the
novel provides a counter-discourse to consider globalized violence. The haunting
image of the falling man, with its biblical allusion to human depravity, also indicates
the existential crisis of survivors in the post-9/11 era.
Keywords: Don DeLillo, Falling Man, post-9/11 spectacle
Authors: Li Shunchun <[email protected]> is a professor of English at Jiangsu
University of Technology, Changzhou, China (213001), specializing in comparative
literature and American literature. Li Han <[email protected]> is an M.A. student
in School of Liberal Arts, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China (214000), whose
research interest is in comparative literature and world literature.
On the Trauma Narrative in Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs
ABSTRACT: Lorrie Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs, written in 2009, narrates
Tassie Keltjin’s life experiences at the age of twenty against a backdrop of historical
events such as the 9/11 terrorist attack and American military and political
interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Half-elegy and half-criticism, this post-9/11
novel addresses personal, racial and collective traumas by employing a set of
narrative techniques, including metaphors that foreshadow trauma, confessional
narratives that act out and work through trauma, and intertextualized histories of
collective trauma.
Keywords: A Gate at the Stairs, trauma narrative, metaphor, confessional narrative,
intertextuality
Author: Kong Rui <[email protected]> is a lecturer at School of Foreign
Languages, Shanxi Normal University, Linfen, China (041004). Her research work
focuses on contemporary American literature.
Experientiality and Topophilia in Housekeeping
ABSTRACT: Housekeeping, a Pulitzer-Prize nominated novel by contemporary
American writer Marilynne Robinson, portrays the American West with a prominent
sense of feminism and place. Breaking one’s physical bond to a geographical place,
the novel represents through experientiality an emotional topophilia, a
transcendentalist mentality and a perceptual reality that Robinson identifies with. In
this way, Housekeeping creates an experience of time and space through transgression,
constructs a postmodern idea of place with modern mobility, and pursues a sense of
home and intimacy in human relationship by returning to regional culture in this age
of globalization.
Keywords: Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, experientiality, topophilia
Author: Hu Biyuan <[email protected]> is a professor at College of
International Languages and Cultures, Hohai University, Jiangsu, China (210098).
Her researches focus on ecocriticism as well as modern and contemporary American
fiction. .
Displacement and Sense of Loss:
Transnational Identities in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss
ABSTRACT: The Indian diasporic writer Kiran Desai won the 2006 Man Booker
Prize for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss. This essay discusses the
in-betweenness of transnational identities in that novel and the consequent sense of
loss due to displacement. Interweaving historical narratives and contemporary issues,
the novel explores the lingering effects of British colonization upon the Indian people,
reflects on the historical confrontation between Nepalese immigrants in India and
other ethnic groups, and creatively tackles pertinent issues of today’s globalizing
world. The novel therefore makes a perfect site for understanding the consequences of
globalization.
Keywords: Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, transnational identities,
displacement
Author: Du Lanlan <[email protected]> is an associate professor of English at
School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China
(200240). Her main research interest is in feminist theory and criticism, and
contemporary British and American fiction.
Boris Vian: Between the Real and the Surreal
ABSTRACT: Boris Vian was a writer defying labels in that his works, which provide
a razor-sharp delineation of the bewilderment, rebellion and struggle of the younger
generation after World War II, feature elements of both realism and surrealism. His
novel Foam of Times typically transcends the boundary between reality and fantasy.
Not only does the novel fulfill Vian’s surrealistic claim that the poet was supposed to
be a communicating vessel, but it also underlines the absurdity, cruelty and tenderness
of reality by adopting artistic approaches of symbolism, black humor and surrealism.
Widely read and acclaimed for their artistic value, Vian’s writings also have social
connotations too profound to be overlooked.
Keywords: Boris Vian, Foam of Times, realism, surrealism, black humor
Author: Li Wanwen <[email protected]> is an associate professor at College of
Foreign Languages, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing,
China (210046), specializing in French literature.
The Narrative Structure and Trauma Writing of
Haruki Murakami’s Underground
ABSTRACT: Underground, a non-fiction work published in 1997, allegedly marked
a new turn in the career of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Scholars in mainland
China have studied this work on topics such as its realistic significance and its relation
to the transformation of Murakami’s literary career. Based on close reading of the text,
this paper studies the narrative structure and the narration of trauma in Underground.
Keywords: Haruki Murakami, Underground, narrative structure, trauma writing
Author: Lü Bin <[email protected]> is a lecturer at School of Foreign Studies,
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210046), specializing in Japanese literature.
Rethinking the Post-9/11 Role of Media in The Unknown Terrorist
ABSTRACT： Australian post-9/11 fiction remarkably differs from post-9/11 fiction
in the United States in its focus on the other side of the story, usually taking the
perspective of individual human beings to interrogate counter-terrorism as a
tyrannical national and international discourse. Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown
Terrorist, for one, rethinks the role of media in the post-9/11 world. The novel
examines how media collaborate with corporate interests to shape consumer society
and universalize the consumerist way of living. Media combined with political power,
Flanagan reveals, can tyrannize individuals and endanger human values such as
freedom and love.
Keywords: Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist, 9/11 fiction, media,
counter-terrorist discourse
Author: Zhou Xiaojin <[email protected]> is an associate professor at
Languages School, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics,
Shanghai, China (201620). His major research interest is in Australian literature.
Sites of Memory in Song of Solomon
ABSTRACT：The American South and blues music function as sites of memory in
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The novel romanticizes and consecrates the South
to build a temple of collective memory and spiritual shelter for black people. The
blues “Song of Solomon” as African American cultural imprinting, undermines the
dominant white discourse and merges physicality with spirituality, displaying how the
black tradition has been formed and inherited. Rather than repeating the past, the sites
of memory in Song of Solomon show how African Americans use the past and how
the past influences their present life.
Keywords: Song of Solomon, sites of memory, the American South, the blues
Author: Zeng Zhuqing <[email protected]> is an associate professor at
School of Foreign Languages, Central South University, Changsha, China (410083),
specializing in American literature.
Narrative of Space in Toni Morrison’s Home
ABSTRACT: In May 2012, Toni Morrison’s tenth novel Home was published. It
tells the story of Frank Money, a black soldier who, after returning from Vietnam,
manages to rescue his sister from death, and tries his best to construct a warm “home”
of love. With frequent changes of space, the novel presents a series of stories
connecting history and reality. This paper attempts to analyze three types of space
narrative in Home: topographical space, mental space and social space. The purpose is
to figure out the vital relationship between history and subjectivity for the black
people, and how they get to know themselves by remembering their own history.
Keywords: Toni Morrison, Home, topographical space, mental space, social space
Authors: Xu Keqi <[email protected]> is a professor at School of Foreign
Languages, Southeast University, Nanjing, China (210096). His major academic
interests include British and American literature. Ma Jingjing <majingjoy@
163.com> is a postgraduate at School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University,
Nanjing, China (210096). Her research focuses on British and American literature.
Reading the Theme of Loss in Alice Munro’s “Runaway”
ABSTRACT: Through narrating the unsuccessful runaway of Carla in her story
“Runaway”, Alice Munro demonstrates the ethical dilemma of women in the 21st
century. The ethic of autonomy, which requires absolute will of the subject, ends up as
a myth. If accepting one’s nothingness-in-the-world, however, the human being
cannot dwell poetically. Caring for the other may on the one hand enables one to
overcome the sense of meaninglessness but, on the other hand, may deprive a woman
of her freedom.
Keywords: Alice Munro, “Runaway”, post-subject, ethical dilemma, loss
Author: Li Yun <[email protected]> is an associate professor at Foreign
Language School, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
(510641), specializing in contemporary literature and culture.
The Anti-Statist Narrative Ethics of Doctor Zhivago
ABSTRACT: Narrative ethics refers to ethical values and moral judgments expressed
in a narrative situation. In Russian literature, the entrenched narrative tradition of
statism has marginalized narrative ethics of free individuality. Boris Leonidovich
Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago breaks the statist tradition to champion the opposite
narrative ethics featuring personal narrative, ethic narrative, and liberal narrative to
defy authoritarianism.
Keywords: Doctor Zhivago, narrative ethics, statism, free individual
Author: Sun Lei <[email protected]> is a Ph.D. candidate at Beijing Foreign
Studies University, Beijing, China (100089), specializing in Russian literature.
The Plight of Survival and the Art of Memory in Patrick Modiano’s Fiction
ABSTRACT: Patrick Modiano, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014,
has created a series of autobiographical novels in his literary career. Set in the
German-occupied Paris during WWII, these works represent the lives of common
people tested and tempered by history to probe into the plight of human survival.
Devotion to themes such as whimsical identity, fragile memory and perplexing
adolescence, combined with his unique art of memory, enables Modiano to evoke
through fiction “the most ungraspable human destinies.”
Keywords: Patrick Modiano, plight of survival, art of memory
Authors: Jiang Haijia <[email protected]> is a Ph.D. candidate at School of Foreign
Languages, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023), and a lecturer at School of
Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
(210023), specializing in French literature and semiotics. Zhang Xinmu
<[email protected]> is a professor of French at School of Foreign
Languages, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023), specializing in semiotics
and French literature.
After Transcending the Second:
An Ecocritical Reading of Beauvoir
ABSTRACT: In her 1949 monograph The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
developed an interpretative framework which would become one of the theoretical
sources of ecofeminism. She argues that the patriarchal system, separating self and
other, elevates a transcending subjectivity that frees itself from the confinement of
body/nature. Birth and maternity, classified by patriarchal discourses as “second”
along with women, have been reduced to objects to be transcended, excluded and
dominated. Yet the redemption suggested by Beauvoir demands that women overcome
their nature and thus fails to transcend patriarchal dualism and linear progress to
actually achieve women’s liberation. There are seeds of harmony in her writing,
nevertheless, which anticipate a real transcendence by eradicating dualistic
domination and finally reconciling men with women, human with nature.
Keywords: Simone de Beauvoir, “The Second Sex”, ecofeminism, nature
Author: Wei Qingqi <[email protected]> is an English professor at School of
Foreign Languages and Cultures, Ginling College, Nanjing Normal University,
Nanjing, China (210097), specializing in comparative literature, ecocriticism, and
gender studies.
Postmodernism in British Literature: A Historical Survey
ABSTRACT：This historical survey of postmodernism in British literature traces its
development from inception in the late 1930s, to its expansion in the 1940-50s and
prosperity in the 1960-70s, and to its decline in experimental zest over three decades
from the late 1970s through 1990s, when eclecticism and “internationalization”
became literary norms. Postmodernism in British literature, the article argues, never
reached an acme as in America and France because the British value their own great
tradition of realism.
Keywords: British literature, postmodernism, experimentalism, eclecticism
Authors: Wang Xiaoling <[email protected]> is a doctoral candidate at
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China (200240), whose major research area
is British literature. Hu Quansheng <[email protected]> is a professor of
English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, specializing in postmodernist fiction and
narratology.
A Corporeal Narratologist Approach to the Body that Desires
ABSTRACT: Corporeal narratology studies the function and meaning of the body in
the act of narration. Since the narrative impetus of modern fiction and fine arts is the
body that desires, the process of narration therefore becomes the semioticization of
the body, or the situational embodiment of being communicating with the world, the
main representation of which is desire. In a given text, the relationship between the
body and its situation gives meaning to narrative events, thereby endowing the text
with a unified, coherent significance.
Keywords: corporeal narratology, situational body, desire, narrative
Author: Ouyang Cancan <[email protected]> is an associate professor at
College of Chinese Literature, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, China (541004),
specializing in body studies and comparative poetics.
Pound and Pound Studies in a Nutshell:
A Review of Ezra Pound Studies by Jiang Hongxin
ABSTRACT: The 2014 publication of Ezra Pound Studies, by Jiang Hongxin, is a
milestone for Chinese researches on Ezra Pound. The book provides Chinese scholars
with a panoramic view of Pound and Pound studies, including a brief history of
Pound’s life, a collection of Pound’s poems in Chinese translation, a list of Pound’s
works, and a summary of previous researches on Pound in China and abroad. The
book also includes objective criticisms on Pound’s literary theory and his economic
and political views. As the first comprehensive guide in China to Pound and Pound
studies, the book will play a significant role in reviving the public and critical interest
in this major modernist American writer.
Keywords: Jiang Hongxin, Ezra Pound Studies, Pound studies in China
Author: Tan Xiaocui <[email protected]> is a lecturer at the School of Foreign
Languages, Qilu University of Technology, Jinan, China (250353), specializing in
British and American poetry.
Hilary Mantel Studies in China
ABSTRACT：Hilary Mantel studies in China has made some achievements in
introducing Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning works, studying her life experiences and
literary career, and analyzing her serial representation of Thomas Cromwell. These
achievements are nevertheless limited in scope and seldom if ever feature the
researchers’ local consciousness in reading her works. The variety of subjects in
Mantel’s novels, on the other hand, demonstrates a persistent concern with
contemporary social issues, especially those related to national identity. This critical
summary of Mantel studies in China aims to open a window to further researches on
this major British writer and her fiction.
Keywords：Hilary Mantel, Mantel studies in China, local perspective, national
identity
Author：Yan Chunmei <[email protected]> is an associate professor at School of
Foreign Languages，Quzhou University，Zhejiang，China (324000)，specializing in
British and American literature.