The fifth panel discussion (2007/08/20)
The Taiwan—Hong Kong Axis by
Ⅰ. Background of Japan
A. Today Japan seems to play the role of an intermediary between the East and the West, its high degree of civilization and technical modernization serving to bring the two cultures closer together.
B. Miner: the cultural character or destiny of Japan has not been to create ideas or philosophies as China and India have created them, but to re-create through transmission and refinement what the older Oriental cultures have had to offer.
C. Japanese ingenuity has modified, improved, and impressed upon the rest of the world.
D. similar situation: Europe→the United States; China→Japan
Ⅱ.The first conference (Tamkang University, 1971) (pp 78-87)
Keynote: CL held in the East and attended by scholars from both hemispheres
A. Lyricism
1. Shih-hsiang Chen
a. Lyricism is typical of the literature surrounding China in contrast with the epic and dramatic traditions that dominate the Occident.
b. Criticism in the East has emphasized the lyric nature of poetry, whereas that of West has been primarily occupied with the problem of epic and dramatic verse.
2. Claudo Guillen
a.The Western tradition is multiform and manifold, not monolithic.
b. percipient application of the linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson to the Chinese tradition→biopolar structure of language→poetic expression in parallel verse.
3. Yip Wai-lim
a. The poets in his anthology (contemporary Chinese poets of Taiwan)combine the influence of classical models and philosophy with modern themes and techniques.
b. analyzes the “esthetic of pure experience” in the work of a classic eighth-century Chinese poet, Wang Wei, translates many passages into English, and cites several parallels in the work of modern American and German poets.
B. Literary criticism and the application of Western literary theory and methods to the study of Chinese literature
1. Father Fernando Mateos
the linguistic and conceptual structure of Chinese proverb→supplied similar parallels from the West
2. Dean Kao Ming
Chinese languages and literature→in the manner of Herder’s treatment of the German national Character as reflected in folklore and legend
3. John Y. H. Hu
the fourteen-century Lute Song 琴曲歌 of Kao Ming→the classical Chinese theather of tragic drama corresponding to the ancient Greek conception
4. Lily C. Winters
the techniques of psychoanalytical criticism→Li Sao by Ch’u Yuan and the poetry of English romanticism
C. Translation
A. Taiwan conference ignored previous publications and offered little on theory or general problems of translation that had not already been covered by previous authors.
B.There exist special problems in the translation of an oriental language based on symbolic characters into an occidental one using an alphabet, or the reverse, but these special problems were not at all singled out or developed by the papers.
1. Saburo Ota
a. The common reader in Japan at that time seemed to enjoy Western novels that could be characterized as traditional or classical.
b. the French nouveau romman and American novels→only critics paid any attention to them
2. Robert Escarpit
a. In France only professional critics were impressed by such esoteric authors as Robbe-Grillet, and publishers had difficulty in selling and edition of a few thousand copies.
b. Are literary critics making a mistake by devoting most of their talents and energies to works that fail to demostrate any kind of universal appeal?
3. Charles Witke and Father Miguel A. Bernad
To the reguirement that all comparative study be based upon texts in the original language.
D. The method of rapprochement or the revealing of analogies without direct contact
1. Hen-hsiung Jeng
traced the theme of metamorphosis through representative myths in Greek and Bunun, an aboriginal language of Taiwan.
2. Lily Winters
discerned psychological links between Li Sao and English Romanticism.
3. Ching-hsien Wang
a. linked Li Sao with Spenser’s Renaissance philosophical epic, The Faerie Queene.
b. “formative tropes”- placing two poems in a common literary category-that of the allegorical quest.
4. Father Bernad (pedagogy)
embarked upon a novel theme, the techniques of explaning difficult passages in Shakespeare to Chinese university students.
5. Josephine Huang Hung
The Riverside Pavilion v.s. Candida – resemblances are upon character portrayal and the reflection of life.
6. Koki Sato
Western books→Chinese or Dutch version→Japan
E. The influence of Chinese tradition over Korean literature
1. Chinese models affected the myths and legends of Korea
2. Most early Korean novels were imitations of the Chinese.
F. The penetration of Chinese culture in the Philippines (p 84)
1.Elmer A. Ordonez (from 16th century to the present)
a. Treatments: linguistic assimilation, folklore, mercantile relations, acdemic curricula, periodical publications, and selected poetry
b. Asian countries had not been entirely broken down by the subsquent association of Filipinos with Spanish and American literature.
2. Cirilo F. Bautista
a. “dichotomous personality” in English poetry made by natives of the Philippines
b. the use of English apparently represented a disturbing current without direction rather than a positive force.
3. Bautista
a. Best contemporary writing in the Philippines is engage or committed to social reform.
G. Brief summary
1. lack of literary history
2. lack of the rich literature of India and the literatures of the European continent
3. The emphasis in nearly every paper was either on two or three Eastern literatures or on English or
American literature combined with a single Eastern literature.
4. For the younger generation, the West is indubitably the symbol of the modern era.
5. There was an overabundance of well-intentioned theory and generalizing and a corresponding shortage of the concrete- whether in literary history or in concentration on specific literary texts.
Ⅲ.The second conference (Tamkang University, 1975) (pp 87-96)
Keynote: Literary Theory and Criticism East and West
A. Preface
1. Limin Chu
a. applying Western methods of literary criticism to study of both classical and modern Chinese and Japanese literature.
b. Chinese scholar in approaching his own literature is unable to fathom the Chinese mind and that he is helped to do so by enlisting Western methods of criticism
2. David Malone
a. Some linguists and anthropologists have maintained that language itself raises almost impenetrable barriers to the perception and cognition of other countries.
b. “self-conscious” and “self-justifying” values may not be relevant to the products of other cultures are
the glorification of the individual.
c.The Western nations have “dealt with the rest of the world in an essentially imperialistic manner.”
3. Henry Levin
a.The paradox in the concept of empire, either political or cultural, is that its proponents attempt to be both nationalistic and univeral—nationalistic by maintaining their own superiority and universal by attempting to enforce their own pattern of behavior upon the rest of the world.
B. Parallel
1. Andre Gide : every great writer must first of all “find himself” by immersion in his own nationality.
2. Henry Levin
a. judging a citizen by the laws of a country other than his own
b. Indicating points of similarity between two literatures does not in itself infringe upon the individual character of either one, but a pattern of judging Eastern works by the standards of Western criticism would almost certainly tend to diminish Eastern national identities.
C. Chinese calligraphy and poetic expression
1. Gunther Debon
a. the absence of the personal pronoun in Chinese diction
b. the subject observing and the object being observed are not clearly separated as they are in Western language and culture.
c. an emotional identification between the poet and the natural object—ch’ing
1) the feelings 2) the emotional condition of the person
3) the emotional situation of the object in nature
2. John Ruskin
a. pathetic fallacy
b. As a result of Ruskin’s derogatory reference, the imparting of feelings to objects in nature is now generally considered a blemish in English poetry.
3. Western perspectives
a. the occidental mind conceives of the nature of man as “very different from the nature of other beings in the world”
b. contempt for trees and rivers, and hates to be like them
4. Tse-tsung Chow
a. yi in Chinese lyric poetry— “inhabits” the poem as a result of the words in the poem but is “beyond” the words
b. a blend of ambiguity with intuition
c. the experience conveyed or created in a Chinese lyric poem is not a “moral,” still less a message, not even an intuition—but a sense.
5. Kenner
a. certain 19th century Western scholars misinterpreted Chinese poetry by reading into it moral elevation or solemnity, and that certain Symbolists also misconstrued Chinese poetry.
b. Pond and others conceived of Chinese poetry as representing an ontologically independent world and then used the notion as the basis of a theory in which “the organic poem’s molecules could be words in a comparably organic language.”
c. the “poem” should seem not to have come from an author but from the secret forces of language.
6. Douwe W. Fokkema (p 91)
a. embraces not only the relation between the word and the object in regrad to the nature of reality, but also the meaning of human experience in phenomenological terms in regard to the threefold nature of truth, that is, “material,” “logical,” and “poetical.”
b. isolated dichotomies between the word and the world, or the symbol and the meaning, in both Western and Eastern languages, but observed in addition that the understanding of literature requires more than the deciphering of symbols or iconic relations.
c. we cannot abstract literary texts from the context in which they funciton.
d. “code” system—the code of one paticular literary period or movement may come into contact with those of other periods of movements in roughly the same cultural region or area.
D. Alphabets and Ideograms
1. Wai-lim Yip
a. The freedom of Chinese calligraphy from the personal identification represented by pronouns in Western languages, together with its apparent ontological independence, maybe related to what has been called “the loss of self” in modern literature.
b. The differences of different people which reflect not only in their responses to linguistic symbols, but also in the nature of liguistic symbols themselves.
c. alphabet: elaboration of abstract ideas, analytical discursiveness and syllogistic progression
ideogram: 1) to perceive concretely in images and objects
2) to arrest things in their simultaneous multiple spatial relationships
3) to suggest and represent an abstract idea by keeping close to the total environment capture in a composite image
E. Models
1. Wai-lim Yip
a. discards the attempt to create a single or uniform “model,” but to begin simultaneously with two or three “models,” shading into each other, and making full use of comparison and contrast.
F. Chinese metaphysics
1.Vincent Shih (The Second Harmony)
a. three types of truth—material, logical, and poetical
b. a state of mind may be reached in life in which the world of truth and the world of the senses coalesce; in other words, that noumenal and phenomenal perception may occur simultaneously.
c. This condition of feeling an identity with nature beyond logical verification may also be attained by the poet through the exercise of his funcitons.
The example of Chan master
d. naive perception in a condition of innocence provides the deepest internal satisfaction and access to reality
2. author’s comment about
a. the essentiial nature of Chinese poetry is impersonal and unemotional
b. it utilizes symbol and metaphor to a very high degree.
c. the body of ancient and modern text is relatively uniform and static.
d. Chinese poetry has more in common with the aesthetic theories of Ezra Pond and T. S. Eliot than with those of Wordsworth.
3. Chu-Whan Cha
a. 5th centry critic Chung Hung considered it to be the primary requisite for poetic creation.
b. T. S. Eliot: 1) objective correlative 2) emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet
c. Wordsworth: the spontaneous expression of natural emotion
d. personal experience of the poet is a potent factor of bringing significant emotion in the poetry.
4. Ch’ing-ping Yeh
* The impression that Chinese poetry from ancient times to modern has followed a single tradition with essentially no variation was completely shattered by Ch’ing-ping Yeh in his treatment of conservatism and originality in Chinese literature.
a. the dominant conservatism of Chinese culture may give the impression of a cyclical pattern of literary history rather than one of continuous progress, but that various creative and original voices have contimually pressed for reform so that a pattern of development may be discerned in which “Chinese literature seems to step two paces forward and one pace backward.”
G. Brief summary
The Moderns in the West particularly sought to discredit Aristotle, just as the Chinese creative critcs cited by Yeh attempted to combat the weight of tradition.
Ⅳ.The third conference (Tamkang University, 1979) (pp 96-129)
Keynote: composing literature, and intra-Asian comparative studies
A. Examples
1. Horst Frenz Eugene O’Neill—Marco Millions (play)
In one direction Chinese religion and philosophy acted as a catalyst upon O’Neill’s creative processes, and in the other O’Neill’s innovations in dramaturgy inspired Chinese playwrights to adopt various modern methods of staging, as Frenz revealed in a number of examples of transformation or assimilation.
2. Yuh-chao Yu Pearl S. Buck (p 96)
In analyzing her novels, Yu revealed that her Asian novels, which contain many parallels to the conventions of Chinese narrative, enjoyed greater success than her American ones.
B. Questions and Methodology
1.Wai-lim Yip (p 97)
a. isolated some of the basic ideological problems that underline scholarly studies of modern Chinese literature.
b. all literary history is inevitably partial and selective.
c. The May 4th Movement in 1919, in which the impulse toward Westernization established itself upon the Chinese consciousness, Yip argued that standards and goals of one culture (the Western) are not necessarily applicable to conditions in another (the Chinese).→loss of national cultural identity.
d. literary historicans may be led by superficial and inconsequential resemblances between Chinese and Western texts→exaggeration or misapplication
e. Chinese intellectualss must examine each Western ideology individually on its own merits→adapted to native conditions
2. Leo Ou-fan Lee (p 98)
a. treating actual history rather than historiography
b. horizontal trasplantation from the West rather than vertical inheritance from native roots
c. In Taiwan after World War Ⅱ→ turned to the West in addition for new literary models
modernism → neorealism, vernacular idioms, provincialism
3. Ch’iu-liang Chi (p 99)
a. concentrated on the concept of novelty or in formalism terms, defamiliarization.
b. in the Chinese tradition naturalness and truthfulness hold priority over novelty and that neither the author of The Literary Mind nor he himself adheres to defamiliarization or the exalting of deviations from existing conventions.
4. Donald Wesling
a. Derrida does not just complicate, enormously, the relation between language and the practical world of things and actions, he writes as if there is no relation whatsoever.
b. revealed the fallacies in Derrida’s theories concerning the supposed antilogocentrism of Chinese written characters.
5. Witke
a. CL method may be used for the purpose of “illuminating a complex and monumental work like Dream of the Red Chamber with an awareness of Western allegory,” but warned that “an understanding of the symbolic processes of literature in any language and the mythic dimensions of human life in any culture must be superordinate to the formulation of anything so broad as a given culture’s literary aesthetics.”
C. The theme of literature and milieu (p102-)
1. Ying-hsiung Chou
a. reconstruction of ancient Chinese history→literature and society→ the use of literature as a weapon of political propaganda
b. to counterbalance the power of an entrenched bureaucracy→ no familiar political phenomenon in the West
* John McCormick Walt Whitman’s relationship to his social milieu (American democracy)
two papers: poetry may be deliberately used to inculcate a particular form of political philosophy
2. Daniel L. H. Lin
a. syndrome—the psychological and social effects of formal inquiries into a person’s intellectual achievement
Flowers in the Mirror (the Chinese civil service system) → Gulliver’s Travels
3. Andre Lefevre (p 102)
a. eclectic approach as polysystematic
b. Slauerhoff who portrayed the 9th century poet Po Chu-i as the protagonist of four novels ans three poems
c. Slauerhoff exploited the persona of the Chinese poet to embody notions of his own
d. writer’s utilization of an actual Chinese poet was regarded as a means of criticizing the writer’s own society
4. William Tay writer’s personal ideology
a. theories of historiography 史料編篆法
b. three major types of history: 1) remembered history 2) recovered or critical history 3) invented hitory
*Pound : 1) the mind flits aimlessly about the object 2) methodical manner 3) be unified with the object
c. Pound’s The Cantos→remember history and the lack of objectivity and accuracy
d. Pound’s synchronic treatment of history→ all ages as contemporaneous with the present→ not trest historical statement as living thoughts, but as dead ones. (p 104)
* Author : Tay’s paper → Pound used or perverted Chinese history in order to expound a reactionary system of political organization
5. Donald Wesling commenting on Tay’s paper
a. the case of Pound challenges the limits of traditional criticism and brings to the forefront the necessity of making a distinction between aesthetic and ideological judgments. (p 104)
6. Wai-lim Yip
a. modern Chinese literature needs for attaining a perspective of totality in history (p 103)
7. Dominic Cheung (p 104)
Lu Chi’ Eastern model→ Archibald MacLeish (poet)
% Gary Snyder contrary to Pound (p 105)
focussing on Zen Buddhism, Han Shan, and Cold Mountain→ the hippies of the 1960s, or the Beat Generation
8. McLeod Gary Snyder (American poet)
a. the translation of Chinese poets and Chinese landscape painting→ Snyder
b. the image of Asia in American poetry “contributes significantly to those qualities that distinguish American poetry from that written in England or Continental Europe”
9. Adriana Aldridge (p 106)
a. Chinese poetry exerted extensive influence upon the French Symbolist movement
b. a pattern of translations from the Chinese to French and then to the Spanish (Pound)
c. described a second wave of Chinese influence, consisting of three separate translations in Mexico,Colombia, and Brazil of an early-twentieth-century French anthology of classic Chinese lyrics entitled The Flute of Jade
10. Kuo-ch’ing Tu French Sybolism in China and Japan (p 106)
a. literary movements may travel from one culture to another without carrying with them a real understanding of the fundamental nature of the movements themselves.
b. Oriental critics failed completely to understand the nature of Symbolism, describing it variously as fantastic impressionism or the product of a nervous temperament. (p 107)
11. Andrew H Plaks (p 107)
a. in a treatment of the full-length Hsiao-shuo traced the roots of the Chinese novel to historical fiction and to the prose essay in contrast to the Western novel, which represents the continuation of a single narrative tradition originating in epic poetry.
b. conclusion: the most striking parallels between the conventions of Chinese and European fiction are found in the relation between the novel and intellectual history.
c. Boht in the Western and Eastern traditions the imitation of the rhetoric of the masses or of picaresque types is a deliberate aesthetic choice with no suggestion that the author is attemping to cultivate a popular audience.
d. all genre study must ultimately base itself upon the major works.
e. In both cultures the rise of the novel coincided with extensive social and economic activity, it focus on mimetic representation and it developed an ironic perspective.
12. Ch’ing-che Lo
a. fu possesses some narrative elements→epic
b. Han fu style to that of a narrative prose work in the English Elizabethan period, Euphues and His England by John Lyly
13. Mowry Hua-yuan Li Ming period “Story of the Wolf Chung-shan” (p 109)
a. the different versions in India, China, Europe
14. Gaylord Kai-Loh Leung (p 110)
a. Tagore’s short verse→ Japanese haiku as parallel models for an ephemeral Little Verse Movement that took place in China during the 1920s.
D. Relations between China and Japan
1. Tokyo Yoshida
Saigyo (Japanese) and Han Shan (Chinese)→ the theme of loneliness→ mountains→ eternal security of mind
2. James O’ Brien
a. novels: Osamu Dazai (Japanese) → Lu Hsun (Chinese)
b. literature as propaganda
3. Andre Lefevre the depiction of Lu Hsun by Dazai
4. Yoon-wah Wong (p 111)
Lao She’s novel Little P’o’s Birthday → childern as its main characters → represents as allegory concerning modern Singapore, and portrays the city island as an ideal multiracial society
E. Multiracialism
1. Seng Tong Wong from sociological and linguistic perspective (p 111)
a. the development of Chinese literature in Malaysia during the 20th century
b. efforts: 1. a valid instrument for the vernacular language 2. establish a literary milieu during and after WWⅡ
F. Translation
J. I. Crump (p112)
Two general principles of special relevance to the translating of Chinese poetry in English:
1) that the translator should utilize the nature and genius of his own language in making equations with the literature of a second language, not the other way around 2) and that in translating works from a period in the remote past the diction should be neither noticeably modern nor consciously archaic.
Joseph S. M. Lau
a. used the method of comparing examples of precise translations with faulty ones
b. quoted George Steiner’s statement, “the more remote the linguistic-cultural source, the easier it is to achieve a summary penetration and a transfer of stylized, codified markers.”
Ann Corley Trail
a. Technique: triumphs, failures, and inbetweens (Shakespeare into Chinese)
b. It is much more difficult to render a work into a language not only linguistically unrelated but culturally unfamiliar than it is to translate into a sister language
Heh-hsiang Yuan “An Inquiry into Possibilities” (p113)
a. represented a solid analysis of the major problems of East-West comparative literature
b. two antithetical tendencies:
1) treat the study of CL East-West as largely an affinity study by either imposing alreadly established Western models on Eastern literature, or by finding in Eastern literatures types of literary expressions that superficially resemble those of the West.
2) the other, resulting from provincial-minded indigenous native scholars who unilaterally and unequivocally rule out any possibility of comparison between the literatures of the East and the West.
→ superficial or inappropriate comparisons are the result of the failure to comprehend cultural pluralism, and the stubborn refusal to admit parallels in other literatures is a consequence of cultural chauvinism.
c. misleading affinities: a comparison of the feeling for nature in the English poet Wordsworth and that of the Chinese poet T’ao Yuan-ming, objecting that the comparison overlooks fundamental differences in their conception of the manner in which a separation between mind and body may be obtained.
d. In the stance of aesthetics, “There need be no factual connexion between the two examples, but the comparatist must know how to juxtapose them.”
e. two contradictions about this discipline:
1) the “Western heritage dimension” 2) “narrowing down the scope of our pursuit”
f. There exist no value hierarchies from different national works for admission .
g. quoting Harry Levin’s proposition that the comparatist must assume “an equal belief in the equal validity of all traditions constituting the unity of knowledge.” (p118)
Author
a. agrees with Yuan’s arguments for cultural pluralism
b. the imposing of models has nothing to do with pointing out affinities or resemblances in style, structure, mood, or idea between two works that have no other connection.
c. At present the literary contrast between East and West resides more in linguistic differences between the various nations i
請先 登入 以發表留言。