CONTEMPORARY FOREIGN LITERATURE Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 2014)
ABSTRACTS
Constructing One’s Own Universe: A Thematic Study of John Barth’s The Floating Opera
ABSTRACT: Though nihilism is a major theme of John Barth’s The Floating Opera, as some scholars have observed, the novel reflects the author’s optimistic rather than pessimistic attitude towards life. This paper studies the novel thematically by focusing on its historical background and writing process. As an author with a strong sense of social and historical responsibilities, Barth explores the origins of the universe and the ultimate meaning of human life. Keywords: The Floating Opera, nihilism, nature of existence Author: Jiang Daochao < [email protected] > is a professor at School of Foreign Languages of Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China (518060), specializing in modern and contemporary American literature.
Every Third Thought and John Barth’s View of Contemporary Literature
ABSTRACT: John Barth’s 2011 novel Every Third Thought embodies the author’s reflections upon contemporary literature. Firstly, Barth examines contemporary literature in the context of cultural history and expresses his view on high modernism by alluding to many literary figures of the period, thereby revealing the relationship between culture and literature and mapping out the contemporary literary scene. Secondly, through presenting a simulacrum of literary awards he expresses a pessimistic view of literary prizes. Thirdly, he evaluates his own position in literary history via parody and self-parody. Reviewing critical comments on the novel and referring to Barth’s own literary theory, this article closely reads Every Third Thought as a manifest critique of contemporary literature. Keywords: Every Third Thought, John Barth, contemporary literature, literary prize Author: Song Ming < [email protected] > is a PhD candidate at the School of Foreign Languages, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China (200062). Her research interest is in postmodern and contemporary literature.
Hybridizing and Blending: Richard Powers’s Narrative Strategies
ABSTRACT: As a leading figure of the new generation of American postmodernist novelists, Richard Powers has not only inherited the postmodernist tradition from his predecessors, but also complied with the information age to absorb a large quantity of scientific data into his fictional discourse, bridging the gap between science and art. This paper contends that by hybridizing and blending literary discourse with scientific discourse, postmodernism with realism, and narrative with essayistic writing, Powers blends literature with science and manages to resolve the postmodern narrative crisis, therefore making a successful defense of fiction in the information age. Keywords: Richard Powers, narrative strategy, hybridizing, blending Author: Sun Jian < [email protected] > is an associate professor at College of Foreign Languages, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China (710061). His major research area is contemporary British and American fiction.
Approaching the Postmodern Technique of Narrative Collage in “The Leather Man”
ABSTRACT: American postmodernist writer E. L. Doctorow effectively uses collages in his writings to highlight features of postmodern literature, namely fragmentation, disarray, marginalization and disunity. In his short story “The Leather Man”, Doctorow anatomizes modern American society and reveals its hidden truth through three types of collage, including the collage of narrative angels and discourses, the collage of historical events, and the collage of characters. Questioning “facts” to expose the lies of power politics and create a de-authorizing effect, the three types of collage impel readers to reconsider claims of historical truth and eventually realize that both texts and facts are constructed, planted in a certain social context and conspired by a certain interest group. Keywords: “The Leather Man”, collage, lie, dissimilation, degrading, disunity Authors: Long Yun < lovelife77@163. com > is an associate professor at School of English Language, Literature and Culture of Beijing International Studies University, Beijing, China (100024), specializing in British and American literature, comparative literature and western literary criticism. Yang Meifang < 413361455@qq. com > is a postgraduate at School of English Language, Literature and Culture of Beijing International Studies University, Beijing, China (100024), specializing in British and American literature.
A Critical Survey of Norman Mailer Criticism
ABSTRACT: Norman Mailer has received both positive and negative reviews from literary critics. This paper discusses four aspects of Mailer criticism, namely self-awareness, power, morality, and chauvinism, and addresses their blind spots. Keywords: Mailer, self-awareness, power, morality, chauvinism Author: Xu Meihua < [email protected] > is a lecturer at School of International Relations, Sichuan International Studies University, Chongqing, China (400031). Her academic interest is in British and American literature.
Rewriting the Myth with Body Narrative: The Feminist Strategy of Political Criticism in The Love of the Nightingale
ABSTRACT: Contemporary British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker rewrites the classical Greek myth of Tereus with the strategy of body narrative in her 1989 drama The Love of the Nightingale. The play casts limelight on the female body to show how women have been immured and disciplined by the power mechanisms of patriarchy and, more importantly, demonstrates the political potential of female body by exploring the possibilities and limits of women’s physical resistance. The act of myth rewriting thus achieves keen political significance and ethical value, confirming the body narrative as a key strategy in feminist criticism and activism. Keywords: The Love of the Nightingale, myth rewriting, body narrative, feminist criticism Authors: Chen Jing < [email protected] > is an associate professor at School of Foreign Studies, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China (230011), specializing in twentieth-century British and American drama; Hu Baoping < [email protected] > is a lecturer at School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China (510631), specializing in British drama and British literary criticism.
Laying Down the Burdens: Existentialist Reflections through Heterogeneous Narrative in Weight
ABSTRACT: As part of the “Myth Rewriting” series from Random House, Jeanette Winterson’s novel Weight rewrites myth to free its characters from existential burdens. In this novel the mythical Atlas casts the universe off his shoulders and the contemporary narrator keeps breaking away from traps in life through self-exile. Moreover, the novel itself casts aside the burdens of “Grand Narrative” and “Anxiety of Influence” by freely employing heterogeneous narrative methods. Through a mixture of polyphonic private narration, heteroglossia and dialogue between chronotopes, the novel reflects on the uniqueness of the individual, the absurdity of existence, the necessity of responsibility and the relativity of freedom, endowing the classical myth of Atlas with contemporary significance and renewed life. Keywords: Jeanette Winterson, Weight, myth rewriting, heterogeneous narrative, existentialism Author: Song Yanfang < [email protected] > is an associate professor of English at School of Foreign Languages, Soochow University, Suzhou, China (215006). Her academic interest is in British and American Literature.
Class, Religion and Sex: Richard Mason’s History of a Pleasure Seeker as a Bildungsroman
ABSTRACT: History of a Pleasure Seeker, the latest novel written by the “literary wunderkind” Richard Mason, integrates the seemingly disparate themes of class, religion and sex. As a Bildungsroman, the novel addresses the class conflicts between characters and the shackles imposed by religion upon humanity. Due to his personal charisma, Piet the protagonist successfully surpasses barriers of class and social hierarchy to rise to his own prominence, and in so doing frees Maarten, his master, from the fetters of religion to find his way back to humanity. Keywords: Richard Mason, Bildungsroman, History of a Pleasure Seeker, class, sex Author: Sun Shengzhong < [email protected] > is a professor at School of Foreign Languages of Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, China (241002). His research interest is in British and American literature, focusing on Bildungsroman in recent years.
Love and Mourning in Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life
ABSTRACT: Julian Barnes’ recent memoir Levels of Life voices a writer’s meditation on the subject of love. Mourning the death of his wife, Barnes traces the universal journey of love as it soars into the sky, falls to the ground and finally is buried in the tomb. The exposure of this inevitable ending seems to deconstruct love, but the grief death brings about also fortifies one’s belief in love. Even though to love means to suffer, Barnes tells us, love is the only hope we have. Serving as a bond between history and individual, death and existence, mourning commemorates and cements love, making Levels of life a humanistic exploration into life and its eternal meaning. Keywords: Julian Barnes, Levels of Life, love, mourning Author: Zhang Li < [email protected] > is an associate professor of English at School of Foreign Languages, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China (450001). She specializes in British and American literature.
Reconfiguring the Community Culture: Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
ABSTRACT: A two-time Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel in her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies vividly portrays the protagonist Thomas Cromwell as a glorious Tudor and a powerful minister to show her unique vision of British history. In both novels she rewrites the historical figure of Cromwell to reconceptualize English national identity and reconfigure the English community culture. The “Englishness” of Cromwell as she depicts it reflects not only the nation’s uniqueness but also its contemporary tolerance and diversity, thus creating new ways of imagining and conceptualizing British national identity. Keywords: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Cromwell, Englishness, community culture Author: Yan Chunmei < wyxycm@qzu. zj. cn > is an associate professor at School of Foreign Languages of Quzhou University, Zhejiang, China (324000), specializing in British and American literature.
Consuming India in Midnight’s Children
ABSTRACT: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with its allegorical historiography on Indian Independence, has been critically acclaimed as a classic of postcolonial fiction. Under the influence of commercialization, however, even Indian resistance in postcolonial fiction has been turned into an object of consumption for mainstream British readers. The India portrayed in Midnight’s Children has been exoticized and fetishized in British mass culture, echoing a feeling of nostalgia for the British Raj that was prevalent during the 1980s. Keywords: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, consuming India, nostalgia Author: Su Chen < [email protected] > is an associate professor at School of International Studies of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China (310058), specializing in British and American literature.
Pages from Tarusa and the Thaw Literature of the Soviet Union
ABSTRACT: Scholars of Russian literature home and abroad have long overlooked the significance of literary anthologies that appeared during the “thawing” period of Soviet literature. This essay takes the anthology Pages from Tarusa as an example of such publications from that particular period. The anthology, whose compilation process subverted the directives of the United Writers Association of the Soviet Union as laid out by Stalin, suggests that writers should have the freedom to form their own communities according to shared politics, aesthetics and tastes. This suggestion has replaced or thawed the rigid official conceptualizations of literature and together with non-official works, motivated the deconstruction of official literature and the construction of a united Soviet literature. Keywords: literary miscellany, Pages from Tarusa, Thaw literature Author: Yang Zheng < [email protected] > is a senior lecturer at School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023). His research interests cover Russian literature and comparative literature.
On the Feminist Impact of Kamala Das’s Confessional Poems
ABSTRACT: A major contemporary Indian poet, Kamala Das distinguishes herself in the Indian literary world with her direct and bold writing style. Her confessional poems explore the private lives of women, express their rich delicate feelings, delve into their complicated psychology and painful experience caught in gender relations, thereby revealing the process of women’s awakening. These poems break the silence of women to foreground a sharpened feminist awareness. Addressing masculine hegemony in Indian culture and representing Indian women’s painful self-rescue, Das’s poetry achieves a universal feminist impact. Keywords: Indian English poetry, Kamala Das, feminism, confessional mode Author: Wang Chunjing < [email protected] > is an associate professor and a post-doctoral researcher at the Chinese Language and Literature College, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China (050024). Her major research field is Indian English literature.
Food and Drink in Günter Grass’s Works
ABSTRACT: Food and drink feature heavily in Günter Grass’s works, reflecting the implicit, complicated and interesting relationships between gastronomy and literary narration, history, power, civilization, the role of women, and meaning of life. Eating and drinking not only satisfy the human need for sensual pleasure but also embody the influence of cultures and religions. While often related to ease, warmth, security, communication and oral narration, food and drink can also symbolize death and disaster. Keywords: Günter Grass, food and drink, narration, history, women Author: Zhang Xinyi < [email protected] > is a lecturer of German at School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023).
The Strategies of Cultural Intervention in Song of Solomon
ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the complicated relationships among four main characters in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon to show the strategies she employs as a writer to construct her political paradigm. In this novel, female characters tactically manifest weakness to empower their voice within the family, thereby rewriting traditional feminism to a certain extent. Black aesthetics embodied by the call-and-response technique and locomotive images in the blues music enable Morrison to question the mainstream value system and disrupt the assimilating white discourses. She also resorts to immersion narratives to reveal the structure of power and ideology underlying grand histories, calling for ethnic groups’ return to their national roots to gain subjectivity and achieve social demarginalization. Through these strategies of cultural intervention, Song of Solomon realizes Morrison’ s dream of unifying politics and poetics in literature. Keywords: Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, power structure, blues, immersion narrative Author: Jing Xingmei < 1143941993® qq. com > is an associate professor at School of Foreign Languages, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China (214122). Her research interests cover British and American literature.
The Genealogy and Contemporary Significance of “the Uncanny”
ABSTRACT: The concept of “the uncanny” has an important place in western literary and cultural theories. The inception of this concept has been attributed largely to Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny”, which was ignored upon its publication but since the 1970s has attracted an increasing number of thinkers, critics and theorists to theorize and combine its psychoanalytical and existentialist perspectives. The concept of “the uncanny”, with its aesthetic negativity, has thus functioned as an illustration of aesthetic modernity. This article analyzes “the uncanny” at the crossroads of psychoanalysis, existentialism and aesthetics to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the concept. Keywords: the uncanny, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, existentialism, aesthetic modernity Author: Wang Suying < [email protected] > is an associate professor at College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China (050024). Her researches focus on western literary theory and criticism, as well as British and American literature.
Deconstruction Encountering Humanism: An Academic Debate Thirty Years Ago
ABSTRACT: As a literary theory and critical method, deconstruction has undergone various controversies since its initiation in the 1970s. The encounter between the humanists M. H. Abrams and Wayne C. Booth and the deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller was especially remarkable due to the unwavering position and solid argumentation on both sides of the debate. Scrutinizing both critical pluralism of the former and deconstruction of meaning by the latter, this essay attempts to analyze and evaluate the vision and method of deconstructive criticism. Keywords: deconstructive criticism, humanism, pluralism, view of meaning Author: Guo Wei < 10thmuse@163. com > is a PhD candidate at College of Humanities, Jilin University, Changchun, China (130012) and a lecturer at College of Foreign Languages, Beihua University, Jilin, China (132013). His research is focused on western literary theory.
Non-fiction: A New Territory for Studies of Pre-18th Century Feminist Literature in English
ABSTRACT: Since 2000, feminist literary studies in both US and UK have witnessed a rising interest in religious writings and life writings penned in English by pre-18th century women writers. In the meantime, more and more women’s writings are being excavated and recognized as works of non-fiction, to the effect of both diversifying the genre and enriching feminist literature. This article argues that the new attention to pre-18th century feminist nonfiction indicates that women in medieval and early modern times in both Britain and other European countries took an active part in social, political, literary and religious activities and made great achievements. Keywords: pre-18th century, non-fiction, religious writing, life writing Author: Pan Jian < [email protected] > is a professor at School of Foreign Studies and Institute of English Language and Literature, Hunan University of Commerce, Changsha, China (410205), specializing in British and American women’s literature.
What Is Poetics Today? — A Review of LHT’s Special Issue The Adventure of Poetics
ABSTRACT: In 2012 the French online journal LHT published a special issue “The Adventure of Poetics” to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the French journal Poétique. A number of scholars, including Gérard Genette, contributed to this issue by reviewing the forty years of evolution of French poetics, analyzing the conditions and problems of French and international poetics and envisaging future development of this discipline. Based on this special issue and other important works of poetics, this essay examines the particularities of contemporary French poetics, discusses possible approaches for further research and points out the significance of such researches. Keywords: “The Adventure of Poetics”, Poétique, contemporary French poetics Author: Cao Danhong < [email protected] > is an associate professor at School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023). Her research interests include translation studies and French literature.
“That the People Might Live”: Native American Elegy Lost and Regained
ABSTRACT: As a genre expressing melancholy or sadness, elegies abound in Native American literature ranging from early oral performances to contemporary writings. Rather than highlighting the past and personal loss as mainstream literature does, Native American elegies embody the mourning of collective melancholia, reflecting indigenous people’s unique vision of the world and the sufferings they experienced. Another important message these elegies convey is that the people might live on. Keywords: “That the People Might Live”, elegy, communitism, continuance, Native American Author: Yuan Xiaoming < [email protected] > is a PhD candidate at School of Foreign Languages, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023). His major research field is contemporary British and American literature.
A Review of A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism
ABSTRACT: Locating American ethnic literature between the competing ideas of culture in anthropology and sociology, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism by Christopher Douglas outlines the development of literary multiculturalism from culturalist literature to assimilationist literature and cultural nationalist literature. This three-phase model sheds new light on the study of American ethnic literature. With the achievement of multiculturalism affirmed, some of the problems in the present form of multiculturalism are scrutinized when it blurs the boundary between culture and race, succumbing to the racist logic of biological determinism. From an interdisciplinary perspective, Douglas’s book innovatively integrates American ethnic literature into a unified field and opens up space for new explorations. Keywords: multiculturalism, ethnic American literature, culture, assimilationism, cultural nationalism Author: Zhao Wenshu