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Europe's New Chinese Literature Europe’s New Chinese Literature Authors of Chinese Origin Writing in French and German A Comparative Analysis by Heidrun Hörner A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literature Approved Dissertation Committee Prof. Dr. Immacolata Amodeo, Chair Jacobs University Bremen Prof. Dr. Ludwig Pfeiffer Jacobs University Bremen Prof. Dr. Nicola Spakowski Jacobs University Bremen Prof. Dr. Günter Berger University of Bayreuth Date of Defense: May 14, 2010 School of Humanities & Social Sciences Statutory Declaration Family Name, Given/First Name: Hörner, Heidrun Matriculation Number: 123456 Kind of Thesis Submitted: PhD Thesis English: Declaration of Authorship I hereby declare that the thesis submitted was created and written solely by myself without any external support. Any sources, direct or indirect, are marked as such. I am aware of the fact that the contents of the thesis in digital form may be revised with regard to usage of unauthorized aid as well as whether the whole or parts of it may be identified as plagiarism. I do agree my work to be entered into a database for it to be compared with existing sources, where it will remain in order to enable further comparisons with future theses. This does not grant any rights of reproduction and usage, however. The Thesis has been written independently and has not been submitted at any other university for the conferral of a PhD degree; neither has the thesis been previously published in full. German: Erklärung der Autorenschaft (Urheberschaft) Ich erkläre hiermit, dass die vorliegende Arbeit ohne fremde Hilfe ausschließlich von mir erstellt und geschrieben worden ist. Jedwede verwendeten Quellen, di- rekter oder indirekter Art, sind als solche kenntlich gemacht worden. Mir ist die Tatsache bewusst, dass der Inhalt der Thesis in digitaler Form geprüft werden kann im Hinblick darauf, ob es sich ganz oder in Teilen um ein Plagiat handelt. Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass meine Arbeit in einer Datenbank eingegeben werden kann, um mit bereits bestehenden Quellen verglichen zu werden und dort auch verbleibt, um mit zukünftigen Arbeiten verglichen werden zu können. Dies berechtigt jedoch nicht zur Verwendung oder Vervielfältigung. Diese Arbeit wurde in der vorliegenden Form weder einer anderen Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegt noch wurde das Gesamtdokument bisher veröffentlicht. March 17, 2010 Abstract Europe’s New Chinese Literature deals with literature — poetry, theater and prose — by authors of Chinese origin using German or French as modes of expression. Only in the last decade the majority of their works was published and became visible to a larger audience, with Dai Sijie and Shan Sa in France and Luo Lingyuan in Germany. The thesis attempts the first comprehensive analysis of this literature using a comparative approach. It scrutinizes the discursive strategies with which the authors of this group position themselves in the literary field. The strategies differ insofar as the writers for example adopt Western stereotypes of China in their works or want to function as cultural ambassadors for China. v Contents Statutory Declaration iii Abstractv Table of Contents vii Introduction1 1 Overseas Chinese as a Field of Research7 1.1 Chinese Migration as a Global Phenomenon . .7 1.2 Chinese Migration to Germany . 12 1.3 Chinese Migration to France . 15 2 Literature, Migration and the Chinese 17 2.1 Chinese Writers Overseas . 17 2.2 German Situation After 1995 . 20 2.3 Recent Developments in Francophone Studies . 25 2.4 Studies on Chinese Writing in French . 31 2.5 Studies on Chinese Writing in German . 34 3 Coping with and Copying the Clichés 37 3.1 Orientalism . 37 3.2 Self-Orientalisation . 52 3.3 Occidentalism . 74 4 Communicating Chinese Culture and History 95 4.1 Staging authenticity . 98 vii 4.2 Narrating a Life Story . 110 4.3 On how to Explain Chinese History and Culture . 124 4.3.1 Shanghai as an International City . 124 4.3.2 The Chinese Language and Naming . 129 4.3.3 Proverbs . 136 4.3.4 Food and Hospitality . 138 4.3.5 Political Movements and Their Depiction . 139 5 Continuities and Discontinuities of Chinese Literary Traditions 143 5.1 Adopting Mainstream Concepts . 143 5.1.1 Wounds Can Heal . 144 5.1.2 Nostalgic Recollections . 149 5.1.3 Atrocities and Violence . 158 5.2 On the Forefront of Chinese Migrant Writing . 164 5.2.1 Cheng Sheng . 165 5.2.2 François Cheng . 166 5.2.3 Gao Xingjian . 166 5.2.4 Ya Ding . 171 5.2.5 Other Authors . 171 Conclusion 173 Bibliography 181 Primary Sources . 181 Secondary Sources . 186 viii Introduction When Goethe outlined the imminent era of Weltliteratur in his conversations with Eckermann, among other texts, it was a Chinese novel in French translation that he referred to as a symbol of this future age.1 Even today this book, most likely Iu- Kiao-Li ou Les deux cousines,2 can be found in the Herzogin Anna Amalia library in Weimar. Could Goethe have imagined that one hundred and fifty years later some Chinese authors would write their literary texts in the language of Schiller and Kleist, of Diderot and Voltaire? In these cases there is no need for translation anymore. Europe’s New Chinese Literature : Authors of Chinese Origin Writing in French and German — A Comparative Analysis provides the first comprehensive survey and analysis of works by authors originating from China, literate in Chinese, who choose to write their literary texts in French or German. This selection of authors has been made in order to show the as yet unexplored parts of Overseas Chinese writing. Academia has almost exclusively concentrated on the works of exiles from China writing in Chinese or — in the cases of North America and Australia — in English. So far texts written by authors of Chinese origin in languages other than Chinese or English have not been studied.3 Within 1Johann Peter Eckermann. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Ed. by Regine Otto and Peter Wersig. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1987. The conversation between Goethe and Eckermann takes place mainly in early 1827. Further readings on the topic: Erich Auerbach. “Philologie der Weltliteratur.” In: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie. Francke, 1967, pp. 301–310.; Hendrik Birus. “The Goethean Concept of World Literature and Comparative Literature.” In: CLCWeb 2.4 (2000). url: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ clcweb/vol2/iss4/7. 2Iu-kiao-li ou Les deux cousines. Trans. by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. Paris: Moutardier, 1826. 3An exception is for example Tamara Wagner’s work on Overseas Chinese writings in other Asian languages: Tamara S. Wagner. Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819- 1 Europe’s New Chinese Literature the last few decades, particularly around the turn of the 21st century, Chinese authors in Europe have started writing in the languages of their adopted countries. In Germany and France a significant number of such writers has emerged and their visibility has consequently increased, most notably with Dai Sijie and Shan Sa in France and with Luo Lingyuan in Germany. The analysis of this larger group of authors is not in chronological order, but rather scrutinizes the literary strategies in a typological way, specifically the strate- gies writers use to establish themselves within the European literary contexts and circles while at the same time referring to their Chinese heritage and the imagi- naries related to China in their interviews and/ or texts. Migrant writing has been extensively investigated in the German academic con- text over the last 20 to 25 years, while in France interest was aroused only recently, in the wake of the literary post-colonial discourse, as a tool of coming to terms with French colonial history. Despite some extensive research on migrant writing in general in Germany,4 Chinese writers have been neglected by German stud- ies (Germanistik), Comparative Literature and Chinese studies (Sinologie), even though these writers were already included in the prominent literature anthologies of the early 1980s5 and kept publishing poetry, short stories and novels. For a long time in France the concept of Francophonie6 focused almost exclusively on the literature created in the former French colonies, including Quebec. Research on French as a language of literary expression for authors of non-French origin has started only very recently, despite the fact that a longstanding tradition ex- 2004. Colonial and Postcolonial Financial Straits and Literary Style. Lewiston, Queenstown, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. 4E.g. in Carmine Chiellino’s handbook on migrant writing in Germany, Ulrike Reeg condenses the information on authors from all over Asia in only ten pages, while in Immacolata Amodeo’s ‘Die Heimat heißt Babylon’ the reference to Chinese writing in Germany consists of only one subordinate clause, p. 49. 5Irmgard Ackermann, ed. Als Fremder in Deutschland. Berichte, Erzählungen, Gedichte von Ausländern. With a forew. by Harald Weinrich. With an afterw. by Dietrich Krusche. München: dtv, 1982.; Irmgard Ackermann, ed. In zwei Sprachen leben. Berichte, Erzählungen, Gedichte von Ausländern. With a forew. by Harald Weinrich. München: dtv, 1983. 6This is meant in the sense of the new Francophonie in contrast to the old one focusing on Switzerland and Belgium. 2 Introduction ists of non-French writers adopting French as their literary language (Giacomo Casanova, Samuel Beckett etc.) along with a consistent number of Francophone authors without a colonial connection or background. This thesis does not only focus on the relationship of literary texts to the target language, culture and country, but also takes into account the author’s original culture. In contrast to the common practice of using approaches from only one discipline, the comparative approach of this thesis encompasses all the relevant disciplines i.e. Chinese studies, French studies and German studies.
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