Re-Dreaming China: Reflexivity, Revisionism, and Orientalism in the Wuxia Cinema of Chor Yuen

Although significant scholarship has been devoted to Hong Kong martial arts cinema in recent decades, with emphasis on King Hu and Change Cheh as key creative figures, relatively little attention has been devoted to Chor Yuen, who directed over forty-seven feature films for the Shaw Brothers studio between 1971 and 1985, most of them in the wuxia genre. In this paper I argue that a critical investigation of Chor Yuen’s work through an auteurist lens reveals a director with a distinct vision and formal sensibility, and encourages a reconsideration of his role in shaping the development of the genre. Through a reading of Chor Yuen’s directorial style and his ludic deployment of Chinese cultural tropes in his wuxia films, this paper will illustrate how these produce a form of reflexive and self-orientalizing cinema that both affirmed and subverted the 'dream of China' proffered by Shaw Brothers to the Chinese diaspora. By heightening the factitious, orientalist dimension of this nostalgic production, Chor interrupted its capacity to work in pure ideologically nationalistic terms. Communicating this transmuted ‘dream’ forward, influencing future directors and variations of the genre, Chor Yuen has contributed meaningfully both to the development of Hong Kong’s cultural hybridity, and to promoting new, essentialized, mobile permutations of ‘Chineseness.

Martial arts fiction : translational migrations east and west

This thesis was motivated by Robert Chard's puzzlement over the translational phenomenon of martial arts fiction in the West. It proposes to address how the translational migration of martial arts fiction took place, first to other Asian countries in the 1920's, but to the West only after a lapse of a few decades beginning in the early 1990's. Adopting a descriptive approach as described by Gideon Toury, the thesis is intended to add further to the limited inventory of case studies in urgent demand to test the polysystem theory propounded by Even-Zohar. The thesis is made up of two parts. Part I is a macro-level study of martial arts fiction, intended to contribute to testing the limits of the polysystem theory. After examining Chinese fiction as a low form in the Chinese literary polysystem and its weak function as translated literature in the Western literary polysystem, the study explores the translational phenomenon of martial arts fiction in the West as well as the concurrent phenomenon as to why so little of martial arts fiction has been translated into Western languages, compared to the copious amount into other Asian languages, to the extent of stimulating a new literary genre or (re)writing martial arts fiction in indigenous languages in Indonesia, Vietnam and Korea, sinicized countries or countries boasting large overseas Chinese communities. Issues and problems related to these translational activities and cultural phenomena are presented as tools to test the limits of the polysystem theory. Part II is a micro-level study focussing on the specifics of rendering Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain by Jin Yong into English. I will argue, in the main, that many difficulties, inherent in both the translating and reading processes, can be constructed within the theoretical framework of Andre Lefevere's concept of "constraint", particularly that of the universe of discourse. Lefevere's connotation of the universe of discourse will be expanded to embrace different cultural presuppositions and literary assumptions underlying two divergent world cultures, hence different reader expectations in the reading process. It is hoped that the findings and results of this descriptive case history of martial arts fiction as a literary genre in translational migrations will contribute to the accumulation of knowledge

Appropriation and Representation

Feng Menglong (1574–1646) was recognized as the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time. He is known today for compiling three famous collections of vernacular short stories, each containing forty stories, collectively known as Sanyan. Appropriation and Representation adapts concepts of ventriloquism and dialogism from Bakhtin and Holquist to explore Feng’s methods of selecting source materials. Shuhui Yang develops a model of development in which Feng’s approach to selecting and working with his source materials becomes clear. More broadly, Appropriation and Representation locates Feng Menglong’s Sanyan in the cultural milieu of the late Ming, including the archaist movement in literature, literati marginality and anxieties, the subversive use of folk works, and the meiren xiangcao tradition—appropriating a female identity to express male frustration. Against this background, a rationale emerges for Feng’s choice to elevate and promote the vernacular story while stepping back form an overt authorial role

Yes prime manipulator : a descriptive study of a Chinese translation of British political humour

This is a descriptive study of Chang Nam Fung's Chinese translation of Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay's Yes Prime Minister, a text characterized by British political humour. Adopting a target-oriented approach, it aims primarily to uncover the regularities which mark the relationships between function, process and product of the translated text, thus adding to the limited inventory of case studies in the field. Targeted mainly towards readers in mainland China, the translation was done at a time (1987-1992) when the political scene in the People's Republic went through cycles of repression and relaxation in the face of a democratic movement, while the translation tradition remained one that upheld the primacy of the original -- a poetics that is determined by the ideological concept of loyalty. Working under the constraints of the ideological and poetological norms dominant in China, the translator nevertheless wished to produce a text with artistic value and a potential to function as a political satire in the Chinese context, posing a challenge to those norms. This skopos has determined the use of manipulative strategies in the translation process, The translation product is thus found to have been overdetermined by the interplay of a large number of factors besides the source text: socio-political conditions, literary and translation traditions, and the translator's poetics and ideology. Finally, the findings are brought to bear on a number of translation theories, especially Polysystem theory and other cultural theories of translation in whose frameworks the study has been carried out. An augmented version of the polysystem hypothesis is proposed, the gist of which is that the political and the ideological polysystems, each consisting of competing systems, normally assume central positions in the macro-polysystem of culture, issuing norms that influence norms originating from other polysystems, and that translation activities are governed by norms originating from various polysystems. It is hoped that this tentative 'macro-polysystem hypothesis, after refinement by theorists and test by researchers, can better accommodate investigations into the role of the translator together with other socio-cultural factors involved in translation, especially the power relations

Seeing beauty in a face: a framework for poetry translation & its criticism

The thesis aims to propose a framework for poetry translation and its criticism. It is demonstrated how criticism on poetry translation can discuss the source text and target text in a way that they may well be two pieces of prose and miss a very important point: their aesthetic value as poetry. The thesis goes on to investigate an important issue of poetry translation: what makes �·poetry poetry. For if poetry is to be translated into poetry and criticized as poetry, this will be a highly relevant issue. An investigation into both Chinese and Western traditions shows that the common ground shared is that poetry in a poem is something holistic and coming from those aesthetically effective contextual relations from the poem. Gestalt Theory is introduced as the backbone of the framework to embody how those contextual relations function and a new term for the poetry one reads in a poem is coined, poestalt-combining poem and gestalt. The framework then is applied to investigate three issues and its significance to the criticism of poetry translation: Firstly, how poestalt may emerge mid the condition for this to happen, i.e. aesthetic coherence. Secondly, the significance of the creative involvement of the reader/translators, which is an important element of poetry reading/translation. Thirdly, the nature of the contextual relation and poestalt, which is highly related to the former two.issues. With this framework, the thesis shows that the poestalt emerging from the source text is the relevant object of poetry translation and its comparison with the poestalt emerging from the target text is the object for the criticism of poetry translation

The Art of Movies

Movie is considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as — in metonymy — the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or “picture”), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies

Bowdoin Orient v.137, no.1-25 (2007-2008)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1008/thumbnail.jp