Wang Wenxing, le « dos à dos » avec le présent

Un Homme dos à la mer (Beihai de ren), le dernier roman de Wang Wenxing qui a été écrit en deux temps et a nécessité vingt-cinq années de labeur, se démarque de ses œuvres précédentes, à la fois de son roman Processus familial (Jiabian), qui l’a rendu célèbre par le scandale moral qu’il a soulevé, de son recueil de nouvelles, ainsi que de ses publications récentes, deux recueils de sanwen sur des sujets divers. Ce texte vient en effet rompre une écriture qui, malgré des audaces de langage déjà très réfléchies dans le premier roman, était restée classique, pour atteindre ici à un travail expérimental sur la dérive du sens à l’intérieur du cadre romanesque. On a comparé cet ouvrage à Ulysse de Joyce, mais cette comparaison n’est d’aucune aide pour suivre le rythme épuisant entre les sons et les mots qui gouverne ce roman écrit sous la forme d’un long monologue. Il amorce une synthèse des deux courants littéraires des années 1960-1970, à savoir la littérature moderniste, en poursuivant une recherche du langage défiant la compréhension, et la littérature du terroir du fait qu’il a pour cadre un petit village de pêcheurs et pour personnages des pauvres hères en marge de la société. On peut aussi penser qu’il adopte par cette mixité même le caractère hybride propre à la littérature post-moderne. Ce roman porte à l’exégèse. Il est plus destiné à la spéculation universitaire qu’au lecteur ordinaire. Cependant, il ne s’agit pas tant d’une écriture de la discontinuité, de l’effondrement répondant aux normes post-modernes que d’une écriture qui, épousant le genre picaresque – anti-roman idéaliste par excellence – décrit non seulement un univers dérisoire, mais se tourne elle-même en dérision. En outre, selon les propos mêmes de son auteur, cet ouvrage, refusant toute catégorisation, est « un tableau de la condition humaine à valeur universelle ». Le parti pris de cet article est de relier ce roman au reste de l’œuvre de Wang Wenxing en l’interrogeant, d’un point de vue historique, sur le rapport entre les atrocités commises dans la guerre opposant les communistes aux nationalistes et une vision du monde où le nihilisme laisse la place au cynisme. Partant de la dernière page du texte, on considérera la question du mal, interrogera sa possibilité chez un personnage qui ne peut regarder l’existence, passée et présente, en face

Gregory B. Lee, La Chine et le spectre de l’Occident : contestation poétique, modernité et métissage, traduction de l’anglais par Eliane Utudjian Saint-André

Le nombre de signifiants à l’intérieur de ces deux titres signale d’emblée que c’est avec un spectre très large que l’auteur a abordé son ouvrage : parler de poésie lyrique, de la société et de la politique chinoise contemporaine, de sa réception dans les pays occidentaux et du problème des immigrés chinois, de la difficulté de la reconnaissance de la différence, etc., requiert un commun dénominateur qui touche à la fois le fond et la forme : l’hybridité. Ce terme renvoie à plusieurs définiti..

Leung Ping-kwan (Ye Si), Travelling with a Bitter Melon; Selected Poems (1973-1989), bilingual publication with a preface by Martha P. Y. Cheung (ed.) and an introduction by Rey Chow

This collection brings together poems written over 25 years and serves to illuminate the contrasts and the development of the poet’s thought. Most of the poems are lengthy and composed in a free form approaching that of prose. As Martha Cheung and Rey Chow observe in their preface, Leung Ping-kwan talks of simple things in simple language. Rey Chow tells us that the author himself appreciates in the works of others neither the felicity of expression nor the fine comparison, but rather the way..

Gregory B. Lee, La Chine et le spectre de l’Occident: contestation poétique, modernité et métissage, translated from the English by Eliane Utudjian Saint-André

The sheer number of signifiers in this book’s double title shows us straight away that the author of this work is dealing with a very large spectre. To talk of lyrical poetry, its Western reception, contemporary Chinese society and politics, the problems of Chinese immigrants in the West, and the difficulties in the acknowledgment of difference etc., requires a common denominator which affects both substance and form: here it is the concept of hybridity. This term refers us to several possibl..

Leung Ping-kwan (Ye Si), Travelling with a Bitter Melon selected Poems (1973-1998), bilingue chinois-anglais, édité et préfacé par Martha P.Y. Cheung, avec un avant-propos de Rey Chow

Vingt-cinq ans de poésie réunis dans cet ouvrage mettent en valeur les contrastes et l’évolution de la pensée du poète. Ce sont presque toujours de longs poèmes dans une forme très libre, souvent proches de la prose. Comme le disent les deux préfaciers, Martha P.Y. Cheung et Rey Chow, Leung Ping-kwan parle dans un langage simple de choses simples. L’auteur lui-même, rapporte Rey Chow, apprécie dans les poèmes des autres « non le bonheur d’écriture ou la comparaison juste, mais plutôt la maniè..

Gregory B. Lee, La Chine et le spectre de l’Occident: contestation poétique, modernité et métissage, translated from the English by Eliane Utudjian Saint-André

The sheer number of signifiers in this book’s double title shows us straight away that the author of this work is dealing with a very large spectre. To talk of lyrical poetry, its Western reception, contemporary Chinese society and politics, the problems of Chinese immigrants in the West, and the difficulties in the acknowledgment of difference etc., requires a common denominator which affects both substance and form: here it is the concept of hybridity. This term refers us to several possibl..

Wang Wenxing, “Back to Back” With the Present

Wang Wenxing's new novel Backed Against The Sea (Beihai de ren), was written over two different periods of time and took twenty-five years to complete. It is different from his previous work, from his novel Family Catastrophe (Jiabian), which made him famous because of the moral scandal it caused, from his collection of stories, as well as from his recent publications, two collections of sanwen on various subjects. This new text breaks away from a style of writing which, despite the carefully thought-out daring of his first novel, remained classical, and here becomes an experimental exploration of shifts of meaning within the framework of the novel. This book has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses, but such a comparison is of no help in following the exhausting rhythmic shifts between words and sounds that govern this novel, which is in the form of a long monologue. It initiates a synthesis of the two literary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, modernist literature on the one hand, since it pursues a search for language which challenges understanding, and nativist literature on the other, in that it is set in a small fishing village and its characters are miserable wretches on the fringe of society. One can also perceive in this very combination the hybrid character peculiar to post-modern literature. It is a novel that prompts exegesis. It is more aimed at academic speculation than at the ordinary reader. However, it is not so much the writing of discontinuity, of the collapse which conforms to post-modern norms, as writing which, taking on the picaresque genre—the un-idealistic novel par excellence—not only describes a laughable world, but mocks itself as well. Moreover, in the author's own words, this book, which rejects any form of categorisation, is “a picture of the human condition with universal applicability”

Synthesis and anticancer activity of novel bisindolylhydroxymaleimide derivatives with potent GSK-3 kinase inhibition

Synthesis and biological evaluation of a series of novel indole derivatives as anticancer agents is described. A bisindolylmaleimide template has been derived as a versatile pharmacophore with which to pursue chemical diversification. Starting from maleimide, the introduction of an oxygen to the headgroup (hydroxymaleimide) was initially investigated and the bioactivity assessed by screening of kinase inhibitory activity, identifying substituent derived selectivity. Extension of the hydroxymaleimide template to incorporate substitution of the indole nitrogens was next completed and assessed again by kinase inhibition identifying unique selectivity patterns with respect to GSK-3 and CDK kinases. Subsequently, the anticancer activity of bisindolylmaleimides were assessed using the NCI-60 cell screen, disclosing the discovery of growth inhibitory profiles towards a number of cell lines, such as SNB-75 CNS cancer, A498 and UO-31 renal, MDA MB435 melanoma and a panel of leukemia cell lines. The potential for selective kinase inhibition by modulation of this template is evident and will inform future selective clinical candidates

Evidence that breast cancer risk at the 2q35 locus is mediated through IGFBP5 regulation.

GWAS have identified a breast cancer susceptibility locus on 2q35. Here we report the fine mapping of this locus using data from 101,943 subjects from 50 case-control studies. We genotype 276 SNPs using the 'iCOGS' genotyping array and impute genotypes for a further 1,284 using 1000 Genomes Project data. All but two, strongly correlated SNPs (rs4442975 G/T and rs6721996 G/A) are excluded as candidate causal variants at odds against >100:1. The best functional candidate, rs4442975, is associated with oestrogen receptor positive (ER+) disease with an odds ratio (OR) in Europeans of 0.85 (95% confidence interval=0.84-0.87; P=1.7 × 10(-43)) per t-allele. This SNP flanks a transcriptional enhancer that physically interacts with the promoter of IGFBP5 (encoding insulin-like growth factor-binding protein 5) and displays allele-specific gene expression, FOXA1 binding and chromatin looping. Evidence suggests that the g-allele confers increased breast cancer susceptibility through relative downregulation of IGFBP5, a gene with known roles in breast cell biology