杨金才-美国文学的中国视野_英文_

American Literature in Chinese Perspectives

Yang Jincai

Abstract: The history of the reception of American literature in China may well be one of the most exemplary instances of the contingent and context-bound quality of literary judgment, particularly when it involves cross-cultural negotiations of value and significance. A cursory glance at any research library’s catalog in China would suggest Chinese perception of American literature is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in today’s Chinese scholarship on foreign literature. Each major American author’s reception in China would require a booklength study. Here I will start from a brief survey of Chinese scholarship on American literature and try to explain how American literature has been observed through three case studies.Key words: American literature Chinese perspectives cross cultural

Author: Yang Jincai, Ph. D. in Literature, is professor of English at the Institute of Foreign Literature, Nanjing University and editor-in-chief of Contemporary Foreign Literature (Nanjing 210023, China). His research areas cover American literature and critical theories. Email: jcyang@

标题：美国文学的中国视野

内容摘要：中国对美国文学的接受过程很好地体现了文学批评的相机性和语境化特点，当批评涉及到价值与意义的跨文化讨论时尤其如此。只要粗略看看中国各大高校和研究机构的图书馆目录，就能发现大量中国学者研究美国文学的文献资料，充分显示出中国的美国文学研究在当今中国的外国文学研究领域中所占的比重。可以说，每一位重要的美国作家被中国读者接受的过程都可以写一部书。本文将对中国的美国文学研究略作回顾，并通过若干个案分析简述中国学界对麦尔维尔、马克 吐温和莫里森三位美国作家的研究。关键词：美国文学 中国视野 跨文化

作者简介：杨金才，文学博士，南京大学外国文学研究所教授、《当代外国文学》主编，主要研究美国文学与批评理论。

The history of the reception of American literature in China may well be one of the most exemplary instances of the contingent and context-bound quality of literary judgment, particularly when it involves cross-cultural negotiations of value and significance. A cursory glance at any research library’s catalog in China would suggest Chinese perception of American literature is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in today’s Chinese scholarship on foreign literature. Each major American author’s reception in China would require a booklength study.

Yang Jincai: American Literature in Chinese Perspectives 23

Here I will start from a brief survey of Chinese scholarship on American literature and try to explain how American literature has been observed through three case studies.

Loomings. The earliest Chinese encounter with American literature can be traced back to April 22, 1872 when the famous Shanghai-based newspaper Shun Pao, also known as Shanghai Daily, published a Chinese version of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” titled “A Sleep of Seventy Years.” However, few Chinese scholars paid attention to American literature until the late 1920s when the Tsinghua University personnel, including Professor Ye Gongchao who later also wrote on the subject in the 1930s, introduced American writers in their Western literature courses. Ye Congchao turned out his essay “Poetry of T. S. Eliot” in The Journal of Tsinghua University in April 1934, which is counted as one of the rst attempts to create comprehensive scholarly appraisals of T. S. Eliot in China. American teachers at missionary schools across China also expounded upon American literature by surveying individual authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In 1926, noted scholar Zheng Zhenduo published “American Literature” in Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Short Story Magazine) surveying the early development of American literature. About 6 years later, Zhang Yuerui wrote a book, Meiguo Wenxue (American Literature), providing a more panoramic view of American literature.

A special issue of American literature appeared in the journal Xiandai (The Modern) in October 1934, offering a critical survey of modern American literature from Theodore Dreiser to William Faulkner. It maintains that Modern American literature is largely associated with American nation building, independence, and creativity (“现代美国文学专号导言” 837). The editors of the issue hailed enthusiastically the birth of American literature fermented by freedom and liberty which, having shattered the control of European tradition, is now beginning to exert its in uence on other literatures (838). Its development has set up a ne example for the Chinese literati who feel urged to construct a national literature of their own (839). Chinese critics at the time were particularly perspicacious and reviewed in their eeting discussions the major leading American literary gures in the rst two decades of the 20th century. They are T. S. Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London, to name only a few.

Unfortunately from 1935 to 1944, China was shaken by both Civil War and the Anti-Japanese War. Reading American literature was too much of a luxury for ordinary Chinese people. The whole nation was afflicted by disasters and casualties resulting from the wars. For nearly ten years, the Chinese study of American literature was suspended. American literature gradually disappeared from academic papers and articles before it was again attended to in the 1940s when China became enthusiastic about the re-introduction of American literature. Many Chinese intellectuals believed that it was necessary for them to introduce American literature in China so as to foster a national literature. A case in point is the 1941 project to publish in translation eighteen American literary books from different periods. Many of them were chosen at random mainly out of a translator’s personal interest. One of the earliest undertakings was Feng Yidai’s full translation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men published in 1941. He also translated Lillian

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Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine in 1944. Melville’s Moby-Dick was also selected for the translation project, but only a few chapters were translated. Instead of being published as a complete book for the project, it was later excerpted in a different two-volume book Oumei Xiaoshuo Mingzhu Jinghua (Essentials of European and American Fiction) published in Chongqing in 1944. Take Herman Melville for example, a complete Chinese version of his Moby-Dick did not come out until 1957 and its translator Cao Yong was generally faithful to the 1930 Modern Library edition, except for the exclusion of “Etymology” and “Extracts.”

After 1949, China, having gone through so many years of revolution and chaotic wars, was entering a phase of nation building for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Its literary arena was once again shifted to one of more political concerns. Only those works considered favorable to the construction of New China could fare well while most Western classics were termed inappropriate or useless. Also due to the American government’s close involvement in Asian and Southeast Asian affairs and its continuous support on the side of the defeated Nationalists in Taiwan, the relationship between PRC and the United States was tense in the 1950s during which the U. S. was regarded as an imperialist nation. Anything American was refuted in China. Thus, the publication project of eighteen American literary books was suspended, without fulfilling its proposed purpose by its designers. This abrupt end of the project was mainly due to the diplomatic tension between the two nations. China was at the moment turning to the Soviet Union for ideological support to construct its socialism. American literature soon fell out of sight in the 1950s, but the 1940s and its preceding decades could be the rst stage of Chinese projections of American writers that marks China’s burgeoning interest in American literature partially featured by a passion for Western literature as both cultural and intellectual nourishment.