Disillusionment with Chinese culture in the 1880s : Wang Tao\u27s Three classical tales

Leading scholars of modern Chinese literature have long discussed how the May Fourth became a hegemonic force and have sought to uncover the “burdens of May Fourth”; that is, those discourses eclipsed by the May Fourth intellectuals as they promoted the goal of openness and pluralism in the New Culture Movement. They have discovered Chinese modernity in the Late Qing writings as early as the mid-nineteenth century, decades before the May Fourth movement. Particularly, some scholars have argued that features of modernity might have stemmed from indigenous genres or classical language. My study of how the West is portrayed in three classical tales written by the pioneering Late Qing thinker Wang Tao 王韜 in the 1880s contributes to this discussion. These three classical tales, “Biography of Mary” 媚梨小傳, “Travel Overseas” 海外壯遊, and “Wonderland under the Sea” 海底奇境, were first published as literary supplements in Dianshizhai Pictorial 點石齋畫報 and later reprinted in Wang Tao’s story collection Songyin manlu 淞隱漫錄. They are notable because they represent the first tales in Chinese literary history to imagine Western cities and Western women—as opposed to any other places or races or ethnicities—in a period when Chinese intellectuals had begun looking to the West for ways to modernize their nation.5 I argue that these three tales reveal signs of disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture surfacing as early as the 1880s, a time when most reformers were advocating solely for technological and institutional changes. Even more interesting, modern sentiments are expressed in classical Chinese. Wang Tao utilized the traditional narrative form of the classical tale to lament the degeneration of the very civilization in which it had flourished

Forms of World Literature and the Taipei Poetry Festival

In poetry anthologies and works of literary criticism, the authority to select which literature can become “world” literature often lies with a single editor or theorist. This essay contrasts those centralizations of authority with the more egalitarian structure of international poetry festivals. Using the 2016 Taipei Poetry Festival as an example, the essay reads the impact of the form of the festival on its audience’s experience of translation, the local in the transnational, and intercultural solidarity. The essay then argues that boredom is a formal flaw in contemporary festivals, and advocates that translations be performed in local vernaculars

On Ezra Pound's Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry in Cathay

This thesis focuses on Ezra Pound's translation of Classical Chinese Poetry in Cathay. A comparative study of Pound's translations with the original Chinese poems and versions by other translators is conducted. The theoretical framework adopted is Toury's (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS): an important concept, 'shifts', is used for the analysis. Lefevere's (1975) seven strategies for translating poetry and Chesterman's (1997) categorization of shifts are incorporated as the secondary framework. The thesis reveals that regardless of some considerable deviations from the original, Pound's translations have successfully reproduced the essence, the delicate shades of meaning, the musicality, the sharp imagery, the precise diction, and the succinct style of the source texts, which has enable Cathay to become a popular collection of translation since its first publication in 1915

Two levels of blending with Homophonic Compounds in Japanese

This study states that discourse serves as a crucial factor for a precise understanding of Japanese puns i.e. a word play with homophones, and argues that the double meanings of a pun can be processed at the lexical/phonological level and the discourse level in this order. Homophonic compounds provide speakers of Japanese with a chance to create newly derived meanings from an unexpected use of a given homophonic compound; however, such derived meanings blend right in with the immediate discourse. Such information processing in mind and discourse can be accounted for by Blending Theory (Fauconnier, 1997).El presente artículo muestra que el discurso es un factor crucial para poder interpretar de forma precisa los juegos de palabras japoneses, es decir, homófonos con dobles sentidos. Se defiende que el doble sentido de un juego de palabras se puede procesar al nivel léxico-fonológico y al nivel discursivo por este orden. Los compuestos homofónicos ofrecen a los hablantes japoneses la oportunidad de crear significados derivados novedosos de un uso inesperado de un determinado compuesto homofónico; sin embargo, tales sentidos derivados se integran en el discurso inmediato. Este procesamiento de la información en la mente y el discurso se puede explicar mediante la Teoría de la Integración Conceptual (Blending Theory)

Analyzing Interpersonal Metafunction through Personal Pronouns in Song Ci Jiang Cheng Zi. Ji Meng

Interpersonal metafunction has been studied in the four translated versions of Song Ci Jiang Cheng Zi. Ji Meng through contrastive analysis with the focus on personal pronouns. It aims to find out that the use of different personal pronouns connotes different interpersonal meaning and test the feasibility and applicability of Systemic Functional Grammar to discourse analysis. It also helps people who love Song Ci better appreciate this Ci-poem from a different angle