杨金才-美国文学的中国视野_英文_(2)

What followed was a period (roughly from 1960 to 1976) in which literature and art were utterly dominated by an “ultra-Left” ideology. Nearly all Western thought except Marxism was ruthlessly attacked as anti-socialism. Only a few American authors such as Herman Melville and Walt Whitman were treated better, for they were regarded either as critics of Western capitalism or liberators and revolutionary models. It is widely known in China that Whitman embodied both democracy and liberty.

Interest in American literature gained momentum after the Cultural Revolution. One relevant factor that contributed to this growth was the gradual liberalization of Chinese political life after 1979, with its more open response to Western culture, writers, and theories, which for almost twenty years had been of cially forbidden. In the late 1970s, a second phase of wide interest in American literature occurred when China slowly walked away from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese literary scholars could face Western literature again. A case in point is Dong Hengxun, who took the lead in editing A Short History of American Literature. In 1981 a quarterly journal named Meiguo wenxue congkan (American Literature in Series) was established to approach contemporary American literary works. As is claimed in its first issue, the journal aims to know better American society and its current thoughts through reading literary works. It is highly stated that the study of American literature in China should be contributive to the nation’s building-up of socialist literature (吴富恒 3-4).

Yang Jincai: American Literature in Chinese Perspectives 25

Of greater academic value, perhaps, but certainly less compendious is the 2002 version of a more comprehensive literary history of the United States known as Xinbian meiguo wenxueshi

(A New Literary History of the United States) in four volumes. It is a monumental and effort-taking project of highly credible studies prepared by noted scholars across China headed by both Liu Haiping and Wang Shouren at Nanjing University. The magnitude of its task is commendable awaiting anyone wishing to read nearly everything written about American literature. Anyone trying to gain some comprehensive understanding of Chinese critical perspectives on American literature soon recognizes his or her debt to dozens of scholars who have taken on the painstaking and often thankless task of identifying and indexing the massive body of secondary source materials.

In terms of text selection and theoretical approaches American literature scholarship in China from its burgeoning phase in the 1930s to the 2010s is quite varied. Early critics like Zhao Jiabi, Zheng Zhenduo and Zhang Yuerui in the 1930s pointed out the paths worth pursuing. The papers published in the last two decades of the twentieth century, even if inspired by a period’s society-oriented scholarship, departed from merely historicist approaches and focused on individual author’s artistic project, applying the theoretical tools of structuralism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, cultural criticism, or gender studies, but Chinese scholarship on American literature in the twenty- rst century advances steadily with its signi cant departure from social concerns, giving rise to a more sophisticated boom of critical observations featured by incorporated approaches such as comparative and sociopolitical ones. Here are three case studies.

First, Herman Melville. Throughout the 1980s, Melville studies in China were characterized by little reference to American scholarship. The Chinese critical fervor during the period featured a focus on the “gloominess of Melville.” The bulk of Chinese criticism discusses Melville’s depictions of blackness in relation to abstract metaphysical concepts. More often than not they quote from Melville’s review essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” to argue that Melville’s own writing re ects what he describes as “that blackness in Hawthorne.” They contend that Melville also had a great power in him that “derives its force from appeals to that Calvinist sense of innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free” (楼光庆 13). These critical views remind us of what Richard Brodhead has observed in his well-written monograph The School of Hawthorne.

From the 1990s on, comparative studies of Melville and his contemporaries or disciples began to claim a fuller place in Chinese academe. A cluster of scholarly essays published in the decade juxtaposed Melville and other authors, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Hawthorne, William Golding, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and Joseph Heller, who had been far better known in China.

Heading into the twenty- rst century, Melville scholarship in China has advanced in varied ways. In terms of text selection and theoretical approaches Melville Studies in the 2000s has differed from that of the 1990s. As far as translation is concerned, more than ten unabridged Chinese versions of Moby-Dick have come out in addition to the translations of Typee, Omoo, and Mardi in 2006. The most ambitious Melville publishing venture of the 1990s was the translation of Moby-Dick. Various Chinese editions of the novel appeared within less than a

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decade. Translations of other works during the time also show China’s enthusiasm for Melville. The release of Billy Budd in 2003 let Chinese readers and literary scholars discover what other hidden treasures lurked inside Melville’s writing. Introductions to translations of Melville’s ction have also stressed that his narratives are equivocal, demanding a more committed, systematic reading of his works. Emphasizing the means and implications of Melville’s ction, this phase has changed the focus of Chinese Melvillean research. Two trends are evident: one stressing reading and Melville’s extended readerships, the other treating his unique style of writing from various literary perspectives.

The brisk publication of Melville’s works has augmented Chinese scholars’ unrelenting efforts in Melville studies. In contrast with the comparative approaches of the last two decades of the twentieth century, critics now depart from the traditional trajectory of biographical and historicist approaches and focus on Melville’s artistic project including his manipulation of narration, characterization, and writing technique.

Many critical studies appearing in the 1990s and 2000s—most in the form of articles written for scholarly journals such as Foreign Literature Review, Foreign Literature Studies, Foreign Literature, and Foreign Literatures Quarterly—address theoretical issues. Chinese scholars have started to observe Melville from theoretical perspectives. More often than not they would turn to the ongoing American scholarship for critical inspiration. For example, I have recently drawn from some of the most consequential theoretical developments of the last three decades in philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism to analyze Melville’s works. My studies take account of ve trends in innovative critical thought: recent theories of power, as articulated by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler; theories of trauma and testimony developed by Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth; the new thinking of ethics, articulated by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida; the New Historicism; and the postcolonial logic derived from Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. My Herman Melville and Imperialism: A Cultural Critique of Melville’s Polynesian Trilogy delves into the macropolitics of Typee, Omoo, and Mardi and treats them as products of a sudden uidity of textual modes and strategies that Melville perceived and recorded.

Second, Mark Twain. Since the mid-1980s Chinese Twain scholars have tried to incorporate contemporary Western critical theories into their approaches. They have gradually abandoned the stereotyped model of “exposure and satire” and begun to approach his aesthetical realm, displaying a wide interest in Twain’s long-neglected minor works. Foreign Literature Studies carried in 1986 an article titled “The Three Phases of Twain’s Composition”, which observed Mark Twain as a humorist, maintaining that Twain’s humor is not all along withering satire but light-hearted, comical and jocose as well (沈培錩 60-65, 59). Follow-up researches also stand out dealing with Twain’s “putative artistic loopholes” (王迪生 3-8) as well as his underestimated ability of “cultivating melancholy” (董衡巽 3).