Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2016"

Ecomedia and ecophobia

Abstract: This essay argues about the urgency for determining why (despite the saturation of popular media with messages about environmental issues) global temperatures continue to rise, unsustainable practices grow rather than shrink, and viable solutions sprint further and further out of reach. To date, no work in ecomedia studies has seriously addressed the matter of ecophobia—one of the ethical positions unwittingly conveyed in a great deal of ecomedia. There are several reasons why so much of ecomedia has had limited effects on pushing people to change their behaviors and thereby halt or slow the warming of our atmosphere: (1) it reproduces what it critiques: media reiterates and perpetuates the ecophobic ethics that are so central to the problem in the first place; (2) it is embedded in a period in which our continuous partial attention runs hand-in-hand with our compassion fatigue; (3) it dilutes the material to such a degree that important abstract concepts are blurred, thus preventing thinking people from seeing key connections, and (4) it is entertainment, and the blurring of virtual and actual worlds makes a lot of the actual news simply another form of entertainment. It is the first of these—the marketing of counter-productive values embedded (wittingly or not) within green narratives—that raises the alarm bells. This essay argues that some of the ideas of liberty America has enjoyed and promulgated are both unsustainable, in an environmental context, and ironically reliant for their continuation on notions—such as sexism, racism, homophobia, and, not least of all, ecophobia—that are in stark conflict with the very bases of liberty. Liberty stops at hate speech and hate crimes (at least it should), yet mainstream ecomedia participates in marketing these crimes.

Modernism and the antimodern in the “Men of 1914”

Abstract: The modernism of the “Men of 1914”—that group of writers so named by Wyndham Lewis that includes himself, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce (and to which is added here T. E. Hulme as one in total continuity with its orientations)—has long posed a conceptual challenge in that an aesthetic praxis of radical experimentation prevails in their work, but alongside a socio-cultural positioning often thought to be “reactionary” in the extreme. There have been many attempts throughout the history of modernist studies at reconciling these two apparently contradictory tendencies, with varying results, none of which could be considered definitive. The present article seeks to bring to bear the theoretical model of the “antimodern” articulated by Antoine Compagnon in his study of post-Revolution French literary history as a framework for re-conceiving modernism’s relationship to modernity. Understanding the “Men of 1914” to be a manifestation in the Anglophone context of Compagnon’s “antimodern” enables us to see, without oversimplification or unnecessary politicization, how the modernist aesthetic of these authors, far from contradicting, actually follows from their socio-cultural attitudes. This analytical lens can also provide a richer account of the unity of the “Men of 1914” as an authentic literary group largely by demonstrating more profound connections (on this very question of modernity) between Joyce and the other members.

Why not Japanese names? Reader response to character name translation

Abstract: Children’s literature invariably reflects the views of adults. Likewise, what they think is desirable or not for children is also reflected in children’s literature translations. Yet adult assumptions, or ideology, may not always be in line with how children actually respond. This paper delves into this issue of ideology in terms of character name translation in Japanese picturebooks translated into Korean. While the majority of source text names are retained in English-to-Korean translations through transliteration, they are often changed into Korean names in Japanese-to-Korean translations. Interviews and an online questionnaire survey were conducted with Korean adult readers to find out how they respond to such differences, followed by an experiment with Korean children to see whether what adults think, revealed through the interviews and a survey, is consistent with how children actually respond. This paper hopes to shed light on how adult ideology affects children’s book translation, and how this can sometimes be misleading to children.

The fictive reflex: a fresh look at reflexiveness and narrative representation

Abstract: Reflexiveness in literary contexts tends to be assimilated to self-reference; to the various ways in which a work may foreground the artifice and conventionality of its own features as representation, narrative or language. In this sense it is equated with metafiction, and regarded as a sophisticated and highly self-conscious use of narrative; here, however, I offer a contrary view of reflexiveness, one which sees it as elementary, pervasive, and constitutive of fictionality. In this view, there is a continuity between the basic logic of mimesis and the self-conscious “baring of the device” that, for the Russian Formalists, defines the literary. I begin by clarifying the nature of (fictive) representation as an act, and identify its intrinsic reflexiveness, and go on to compare this perspective with both the metafictional notion of reflexiveness and the theoretical discourse on reflexiveness around “mirror neurons” in cognitive literary studies. I then situate reflexiveness within a broader interdisciplinary environment, framed by complex systems science and the conceptualization of emergence in terms of representational recursiveness, which allows the two sides of the discussion so far to be understood as complementary aspects of reflexiveness, one of which aligns with the cultivation of (self-) consciousness, the other with the simple enactment of systemic relations. Finally I address the conceptual challenge presented by an account of narrative, and fiction, based upon reflexiveness, and suggest some ways in which it can be understood.

Unnatural narratives in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction: patterns, values, and interpretive options

Abstract: The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed an upsurge and a flourishing of time travel fiction in China, which is physically, logically, and/or humanly impossible. The boom of this new narrative genre has been fueled in no small part by the so-called “postmodernist turn” coupled with the “historiographical turn”, to the degree that it is no longer possible to read it along the lines of traditional narrative theory. With contemporary Chinese time travel fiction as its central concern, this article pursues four major goals: (1) to uncover its dominant unnatural patterns and means of time travel, (2) to reveal its unnaturalness from such perspectives as metalepsis, prolepsis, self-contradictory narration, and multiperson narration, (3) to examine its consequences and values of being unnatural, and (4) to offer a way of naturalizing it by suggesting the intersection of unnatural narratology with ethical narratology.

De l’humain, du posthumain et de leur dialectique. Quelques remarques à partir de La Possibilité d’une île de Houellebecq

Abstract: Cet article se propose d’explorer la relation problematique qui s’etablit entre l’humain et le posthumain a travers La Possibilite d’une ile de Michel Houellebecq. La genese des neo-humains indique en effet qu’a l’origine, les clones sont indissociables d’un projet humain dont ils doivent assurer la realisation. Il en resulte que, meme disparue, l’humanite continue a occuper une place centrale dans la vie des posthumains, a tel point qu’elle les empeche de developper une existence propre. En ce sens, le geste de rupture que realise Daniel25 peut se lire comme l’affirmation pleine d’une subjectivite posthumaine, delivree de son rapport d’infeodation a l’homme. Plus fondamentalement, cette independance prise par le clone a l’egard de son createur humain fonctionne egalement comme un appel a interpreter le roman posthumain suivant des paradigmes renoves, aptes a prendre la mesure du defi que ce roman pose a la definition occidentale usuelle de l’homme.

Beyond the pictogram: echoes of the Naxi in Ezra Pound’s Cantos

Abstract: Two unusual characters appear in the closing lines of Ezra Pound’s Canto CXII (from his “Drafts and Fragments”), characters that may offer up the most complete example of Pound’s much-discussed “ideogrammic method”. The characters discussed in this paper belong to the Naxi dongba script, the logographic writing system of a tribe in China’s south-western province of Yunnan. Pound’s sources are analysed and a new theory of the origin of the two characters—from Joseph Rock’s translation of a Naxi ritual text—is put forward. The two Naxi dongba characters in Canto CXII unlock the meaning of the canto within which they appear, and echo themes that run through the Cantos when taken as a whole. But we can also see Pound using both pictorial and phonetic elements of the script to create a “cumulative ideogram”, and through this comparative Poundian lens we can update our historically limited understanding of the Naxi writing system.

On monetary and literary fictions

Abstract: This paper explores the various ways in which nineteenth century monetary theory and the novel addressed the questions of reality and fiction with regard to the ontological status and social function of money. Departing from Walter Bagehot’s insistence on the reality and realism of finance, and surveying examples of how novels by Dickens, Balzac, Trollope, or Zola represented, or avoided representing, financial realities, I deal with the various notions of money seen either as a neutral or abstract medium facilitating wealth-creating commodity exchange or as an active but mystical agent blurring the division of fiction and fact (Mill, Marx, Simmel). After that the paper gives an overview of economic oriented literary criticism with regard to its investment in relating and/or distinguishing monetary and literary notions of fiction. The essay ends by returning to Bagehot’s argument and raises the question of the appropriation of reality by an increasingly fictitious finance, problematizing the distinction between expedient fictions and deceitful lies.

When the Psychiatrist needs a Psychiatrist: on Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror-reading’ of James Joyce

Abstract: Like Jung before him, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan advances the view (especially in the seminar from 1975-76 entitled Le sinthome) that Joyce’s writing is an individual symptom of Joyce’s latently psychotic mind, which he used in his own quasi-psychotic art that secured him against an actual outbreak. In this reading of Joyce, Lacan is guilty of what I label a mirror-reading: On the one hand, he unconsciously (being spellbound by the allurement of identification) iterates motifs and gesticulations of Joyce’s own text, whereby a hermeneutical intervention does not come off (i.e. he does not add anything to the text). On the other hand, Lacan grossly misreads Joyce’s biography and work from an unformulated projection of his own life story, whereby a hermeneutical intervention does not come off either, since the text remains untouched. The synthesis of text and reader does not occur, and Lacan’s tautological misreading is striking, yet highly interesting as a symptom of the madness of any interpreter ready at any moment to break out in any interpretive situation as such. Lacan remains caught up in his own symptom, whose name rightfully is given and must be understood as ‘Joyce’—or more generally put: The interpretation of a text always contains the danger that the interpreter unceasingly—and without knowing it—stages his own ‘mad’ (self-contradictory) symptom. A symptom I have chosen to call mirror-reading.

Post-Babel language: a condition of Dante’s cosmopolitan literary vernacular

Abstract: The Italian writer Dante Alighieri was inevitably located in the center of this radical transition from Latin to Italian vernacular, which occurred as part of the global shift from the Medieval to the modern era. Responding to the demands of his time, he considered such indispensable concerns as salvation, justice, community, and love, and the issue of the vernacular was undoubtedly one of the fundamental questions. He proposed, in both theoretical and creative writings, that the Italian vernacular was the most crucial problem in his contemporary culture and successfully suggested his conception of the “illustrious vernacular (vulgare illustre)”. His choice of the vernacular instead of Latin in his writings was mainly for the purpose of making his language a tool for communication with the world in which he was situated. Dante’s project for the Italian vernacular can be characterized as giving stability to the vernacular without transforming it wholly into a grammatical language. Interestingly Dante’s project starts from his consciousness of the nature of the ‘dead’ language (Latin), which is unalterable and perpetual; ironically, this is possible only through the living, organic cycle of ‘death and rebirth’, which originally belongs to the vernacular rather than Latin. Dante’s vernacular is not so much the mother tongue, if that indicates the language that a human acquires in his or her childhood at home, as a social language that is circulated and reforged as a refined literature through education and learning. The Babelic diaspora is the environment in which the so-called cosmopolitan vernacular appears and degenerates. If translating Latin into the regional vernacular does not end up by returning to the origin-Latin and deconstructing the regional vernacular itself, and if the life of the regional vernacular can last in such way as to maintain its relationship with the origin-Latin horizontally, then this vernacular can be called a cosmopolitan vernacular. Using this term is among the most persuasive ways to explain Dante’s vernacular. My aim is not so much to define Dante’s vernacular in terms of the cosmopolitan as to trace up the symptom of cosmopolitanism in it. Therefore, even if I use the term ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’, I do it only as a point to take further, implying the whole process of vernacularization or bilingual writing, which was predominant in Dante’s theoretical and creative writings.

Le vampire intellectuel hongrois

Abstract: Notre papier tente d’elucider l’absence de la figure du vampire dans la litterature hongroise, en focalisant sur deux textes contemporains: Le petit garcon et les vampires d’Istvan Baka (1988) et Le vampire finno-ougrien de Noemi Szecsi (2002). Prenant appui sur les affinites ludiques entre texte et vampire, notre analyse comparee explore d’abord le poids de la tradition litteraire du motif, et ce depuis les auteurs de l’Antiquite aux ecrivains modernes, par l’entremise de l’intertextualite. Ensuite, c’est la topographie imaginaire qui retient notre attention: l’histoire de la Hongrie au XXe siecle s’articule autour de deux grands axes vampiriques qui s’inscrivent dans une demarche de deconstruction identitaire. Enfin, l’interrogation tourne autour de la question de l’immortalite: quelle que soit la teneur ideologique des œuvres, la principale preoccupation du vampire hongrois consiste a soigner sa posterite. L’emergence tardive du vampire dans les lettres magyares resulte de la forte intellectualisation d’un monstre erotique.

Fiction and history: conflicts over an invisible border in early modern period

Abstract: The role and the legitimacy of fiction during the sixteenth and seventeenth century sparked an intense debate. Numerous indications suggest that indifference about the mixing of exact history and imaginary facts becomes a more and more dated attitude at the end of sixteenth century. I will examine three different cases: an epic by Luis de Zapata, Carlo famoso (1566), The Agatonphile by Jean-Pierre Camus (1620) and Gilles Menage’s annotations of Tasso’s Aminta. The question of distinguishing fact from fiction in these works appears as particularly urgent and interacts with interpretation on several levels. The question is if one identifies, in more or less explicit ways, the criteria of the fictitious in the texts; furthermore, all three authors would like to impose on their readers a proper interpretation of their work, or the work of Tasso in the case of Menage. What are the motivations, the conceptual means and the results of these three authors’ attempts to highlight the status of their work, and consequently, the very nature of fiction?

Medieval heresy in Croatian historical romances: a case study of Marija Jurić Zagorka’s Plameni inkvizitori

Abstract: The aim of this study is to explore how the social, religious, and cultural phenomenon of medieval heresy has been presented in the historical romance Plameni inkvizitori by Marija Juric Zagorka: from the concept itself to its literary appropriation in the novel. Through a careful examination of the given textual evidence, the essay also attempts to prove the accuracy and authenticity of the novel’s historical background and, by extension, Zagorka’s literary work—a fact that has frequently been contested.

Unnecessary anachronisms as ‘facts’ in Central European historical novels

Abstract: The nineteenth century was the period of nation building in East-Central Europe. Historical novels played a role in the process, especially in encouraging the development of national identity by looking for the national essence in the past, or rather creating ideas about a national essence in the medium of history. This paper analyses several late-nineteenth-century historical novels from the region (by Alois Jirasek, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ferenc Herczeg, and Geza Gardonyi) to show the ways fictitious traits of a supposedly reliable historical background served contemporary political and ideological needs. These traits, which can also be described as anachronisms or author’s mistakes, both contribute to characterising national ancestors as us and also historical enemies as the other.

Christian Signol’s Les vrais bonheurs and Michel Serres’s Biogée: Two books of joy for the modern world

Abstract: The purpose of this comparative study is to probe the common threads that exist between the prose of Christian Signol and the complex, interdisciplinary philosophy of Michel Serres. Specifically, this exploration delves into the problematic nature of the timeless pursuit of happiness in the modern world, as perceived by Signol and Serres. Predicated upon their astute observations of modernity and everything that it entails for the modern subject, the authors wonder whether it is becomingly increasingly difficult to project meaning upon the absurdity of existence in what they describe to be an inauthentic, sterile space. Moreover, both writers express their disquieting anxiety related to globalization and excessive urbanization. They assert that these interrelated processes have further problematized the elusive quest for happiness at the beginning of a new millennium. However, Signol and Serres remain cautiously optimistic that it is still possible to live a meaningful and fulfilling life. In this vein, they propose pragmatic ontological solutions for healing cosmic alienation including a revitalization of the senses.

Haizi and contemporary Chinese romantic poetry

Abstract: Modernism and Post-Modernism are widely viewed as the mainstreams of the poetic scene in contemporary China. However, we can still find some Romantic poets of great importance, which illustrates the revival of Romanticism in contemporary China. Haizi, a talented poet who has been exerting great influence on contemporary and younger poets since his death, is a great example which profoundly suggests the opportunity Romanticism has and the dilemma it confronts in the cultural context of contemporary China. The intimacy between Haizi and Romanticism lies mainly in the self-positioning and self-fashioning. Haizi’s emphasis on ego, subjectivity and will, his claim of poets to be “kings,” is a quite unique phenomenon in the contemporary Chinese scene where poets are marginalized and their subjectivities are weakened by the society and even themselves. Therefore, Haizi’s poetry not only reveals its connection with Romanticism, but also the tension between the ideals of Romantic poetics and the reality of contemporary Chinese society.

The innovative perception of space (Europe) in late medieval German literature: the spatial turn in light of Eleonore of Austria’s Pontus und Sidonia (ca. 1450–1460)

Abstract: The meaning of space with respect to human beings finds vivid expression in literary texts throughout world history. But even though literary protagonists travel on a regular basis and thus experience themselves and the reality around them quite dramatically, space remained a rather vague dimension far throughout the Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century, however, we recognize a noteworthy paradigm shift regarding the perception and relevance of space as a relevant entity determining the individual’s life, as reflected by poets and writers across Europe. After reviewing how most medieval poets dealt with space, this phenomenon is then discussed particularly in light of Eleonore of Austria’s Pontus und Sidonia (ca. 1450–1460), where the western world of Europe in its geo-political dimension emerges perhaps more clearly than ever before and where space in concrete geo-political terms matters significantly, setting a new tone which would lead over to the early modern age and facilitated an astounding popularity of this novel far into the eighteenth century.

Based on a true story

Abstract: The convergence in the 1980s between postmodern epistemology, cognitive psychology and narratology forcefully reoriented the idea of storytelling. From a fictional device for representing reality, storytelling was recast as a cognitive tool underlying all mental processes. On this view, our sense of reality was seen as an effect produced by individual narrativising. This idea has many implications. The aim of this essay is not to try to survey the literature on this complex topic but to characterise two issues that the narrative view of reality obscures. One is the role of a shared reality and the other is political inertia. This argument seeks to create space for thinking about the idea of a common reality which has been traduced in theoretical discussion in favour of fractured reality. It concludes with a discussion of what can be gained by seeing narrative as a vehicle for approaching reality and not reality itself.

Unsettling Irish poetic tradition: Eavan Boland’s feminist poetics

Abstract: For centuries, the Irish poetic tradition has been dominated by male voices. However, in the past few decades, an increasing number of Irish women writers have articulated their grievances against the inferiority of women and the disempowerment of female writing. This paper aims to probe the marginalized female voice by reading Eavan Boland’s poetry. Textual analysis aside, Boland’s critical essays on the lives of Irish women, collected in Object Lessons (1994), will be discussed. The aim of the study is to help shed light on the plight of Irish women and the efforts made by Boland to unsettle the poetic tradition in ever-changing contemporary Ireland.

Novel fiction, newspaper reality

Abstract: At the level of genre, fiction and reality find their respective equivalents in the novel and the newspaper. Fiction as genre meets its opposite in reality as genre, that is, in nonfiction. And yet the novel and the newspaper are the two genres in which nations imagine themselves, according to Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism. For Anderson, the novel and the newspaper narrate worlds readers can easily locate in the extratextual world. Yet this world is itself partly created by the two genres. Using shifters such as we and today, the genres designate their own reception, which depends on their circulation: the nation is comprised of whoever uptakes the shifters. These shifters, however, not the two genres as such, are sharing the fate of nationalism in post-nationalist times.

Gravity’s Rainbow in the light of speech act theory

Abstract: In modern secular societies, social order rests primarily on communicative action and discourse, which together help establish and maintain social integrity, that is, they act like glue that keeps society together. Any deficiency in this communicative interaction, however, would baulk at society’s ideals of equilibrium, justice, and individual development. This article attempts to identify the particular locutionary system used in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow from the perspective of two theories. Using Austin’s theories of locution, illocution, and perlocution allied with Habermas’s ideas on communication to analyze the novel, this study attempts to show that it is mostly Pynchon’s choice of locution that renders his goal of showing how much modern life has been torn away from healthy and genuine communicative actions and been replaced by strategic actions, and consequently, creating the system and ruining the lifeworld, in Habermas’ terms.

Irish women: a different voice in Iris Murdoch’s Something Special

Abstract: This paper aims to do justice to Iris Murdoch’s contribution to Irish short story writing. Although Murdoch is highly regarded among literary critics and common readers around the world, she is primarily labeled as a distinguished English novelist and philosopher. Grand narratives on themes such as morality and existence demarcate the majority of Murdoch criticism, while the fact that Dublin-born Murdoch also portrayed the contemporary Ireland she envisioned is unfairly obscured. This paper discuses Murdoch’s only extant short story titled Something Special, in which the dilemma of mid-twentieth-century Irish women is depicted. Introduction and conclusion aside, it falls into three parts. Part one presents the plight of Irish women amid the patriarchal society. Part two centers on the analysis of Yvonne Geary, the female protagonist of the story, against the backdrop of male-centered Irish culture. In part three, Yvonne’s dissatisfaction with the status quo as well as her efforts to get out from under the patriarchal tradition is investigated. It is found that this less documented Irish text sheds new light on the discussion of twentieth-century Irish women by inventing the prototypical feminist character, Yvonne Geary, and the story prefigures other feminist characters that subsequently arise in contemporary Irish literature.

Ghosts and their contemporary return: the case of Yu Hua’s The Seventh Day

Abstract: This essay notes the return of ghosts to the contemporary literary landscape and argues that contemporary literary ghosts are primarily historical ghosts, illustrative not of awe for the unknown, or concern over individual morality but of awareness of the problematic of modernity and anxiety over dispossession and moral responsibility. This essay analyzes Yu Hua’s ghost fiction The Seventh Day (2013) and argues that it not only evokes familiar elements of the zhiguai genre, such as issues of rites, boundary and time, but also reworks these elements responding to a new historical context and addressing new concerns. Ghosts in The Seventh Day neither abide to the historical time of development nor enter the cyclical time of reincarnation. Their final place of rest, the land of the unburied, evinces a utopian impulse, which must be understood in connection with the dystopian vision of the mundane world.

Paratextual narrative and its functions in We Three

Abstract: This essay closely examines the (sub-)paratext and (sub-)paratextual narrative in We Three (《我们仨》) by Yang Jiang in an attempt to reveal the different roles (sub-)paratext and its narrative play in different places and its special functions in We Three. Following a theoretical discussion of paratext by Gerard Genette, the authors argue that (sub-)paratext and (sub-)paratextual narrative, whether subordinate or not, not only play a crucial role in the works like We Three, but also offer a crystal lens by which both the style and meaning of the text proper could be revealed in a different way. The effect and function of the (sub-)paratext in We Three lie in three aspects, namely, to tell more telling stories or add additional information, to complement the main narrative text, and/or to help reveal deep feelings and family ties with more stylistic variations. Indeed, a close examination into We Three reveals that the (sub-)paratext and the narrative embedded in the (sub-)paratext as typically seen in the three appendices of We Three turn out to be more important than the “text” and “textual narrative” proper even to the extent that the table turned at once, i.e. the text paratextualized and the paratext textualized. The change of the roles the textual narrative and paratextual narrative play, as best exemplified in Appendix One of We Three, in the final analysis, forms a unique narrative strategy in Yang Jiang’s autobiographic narrative in question.

In praise of madness: the landmarks of a cultural pathology

Abstract: This paper looks at the particular relationship between madness and sanity in a dictatorship, specifically in Soviet Russia, as analyzed in Mikhail Bulgakov’s MasterandMargarita and in Alexander Zinoviev’s TheMadhouse. In both cases, albeit in different ways, madness is regarded as a form resistance to communism (Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s), as a particular kind of sanity, and finally as a creative vocation. The relationship between madness and sanity is seen as reversible and can change depending on different perspectives—which are mostly political in the two novels. As illustrated by the two authors, the modern literarydiscourse on madness can be metaphorically shaped by the writer, as a generic category which can refer to various forms of resistance and deviation from the established social, political and cultural norms.

Cosmopolitanism and the question of sovereignty

Abstract: Cosmopolitanism has variously been credited with the possibility of framing human rights in an international order, being more capacious than state-centric sovereignty. However, this casting puts the very definition of the political at risk. This article seeks to address the question as to how to think the political and its binding force with and apart from sovereignty. I would want to argue that sovereignty has and should retain its place—in the formation of political subjectivity, and as normative horizon. At the same time, I wish to explore elements of a symbolic relationship between citizen and subject that could indicate ways of thinking the political subjectivity of the cosmopolites. One of the resources for such symbolisation can be found in the genre of the fable, closely shadowing the theorisation of sovereignty, while transversally crossing its claims, relating otherwise mutually exclusive identifications with each other.

Gendered narrative of suffering in Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Abstract: Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips aroused great controversy when it was published in 1996. This essay argues that a feminist approach and stylistic analysis can contribute to a more thorough understanding of the novel. Mo Yan’s folk language style, unique use of simile, metaphor, and magic realism, embedding of different registers of Chinese, and his use of overstatement, irony and black humor all contribute to his alternative construction of China’s history. It also argues that the novel should be read allegorically and that although the gendered narrative of suffering speaks to the theme of national trauma well, it contributes to patriarchal ideology by confirming the stereotypical view of mothers as loving and self-sacrificial, and of women as the passive victims of power relations.

Spontaneous scripts as fictional narrative: an innovation in postmodern fiction

Abstract: This essay deals with a special text-type in postmodern Chinese fiction which radically deviates from all conventional forms of narrative. Appearing as a “short story” but in the form of a schoolboy’s spontaneous scripts and absent-minded scratches, it presents everything naturalistically in a non-fictional mode. By presenting trivial characters and uneventful happenings in random pieces that constitute a new form of narrative, its author artfully shows rather than tells that life is more realistic in the eyes of a child and is richer, more colorful and meaningful in fragments. With newness on almost all levels of linguistic and narrative presentation, the story practices eventful narration in process narration by interweaving fragments into a highly coherent discourse of fictional narrative. While there is hardly a theme or obvious message in most of the individual pieces, the story as a whole implies undertones of the satire on many aspects of school and family life. This avant-garde literary experiment not only refreshes the reader’s schema of literature and adds to their experience of literary reading, but also contributes to the making of postmodern fiction by enriching the concept of narrative, the definition of narrativity, and ultimately the notion of literature.

Narrating death in Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village

Abstract: Building on the real story of the tragic results of the blood-selling business in China’s Henan province in the 1990s, Dream of Ding Village (2006), the first Chinese novel to deal with AIDS in China, represents Chinese peasants’ complex relationship with wealth, power, desire, and death. In the novel, desires for wealth and power both lead to and fight against death. The novel also narrates an experience in which trauma is always folded within a duration that mixes past, present, and future, combining different perspectives. Through the depiction of an ill society filled with insanity and official corruption, the author Yan Lianke offers an existential parable that embraces absurdity and nihilism in contemporary post socialist China.

Photographic origins of postmemory in Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog

Abstract: Tibor Fischer’s novel, Under the Frog (1992), as I shall argue, could be conceived as a narrative expansion of collective memory, or rather postmemory (Hirsch), partly triggered by famous press photos. The novel exists in a productive interrelatedness with the Western European myth also inspired by these photographs about the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The book added life to the dead photos which, although part of an interpretation, were only skeletons of the story of 1956. The fictional recontextualization of scenes and figures experienced as two-dimensional images creates a valid narrative of the events of 1956 that verifies our notions and images we construct mentally about this historical moment. This fictional narrative engages in a dialogue with the author’s posterior knowledge about the scenes and characters previously encountered in the widespread Western press photos of the Revolution. My thesis that crucial scenes in the novel can be regarded as textual evocations of wellknown photos about the events leads to interesting questions about Under the Frog. These are related to what is the cultural background of the novel’s treatment of the representations of the Revolution, what new meanings are added to the photos by the book and how Western discourses, represented by the press photos and the novel, modify Hungarian cultural memory of the 1956 Revolution.