杨金才-美国文学的中国视野_英文_

American Literature in Chinese Perspectives

Yang Jincai

Abstract: The history of the reception of American literature in China may well be one of the most exemplary instances of the contingent and context-bound quality of literary judgment, particularly when it involves cross-cultural negotiations of value and significance. A cursory glance at any research library’s catalog in China would suggest Chinese perception of American literature is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in today’s Chinese scholarship on foreign literature. Each major American author’s reception in China would require a booklength study. Here I will start from a brief survey of Chinese scholarship on American literature and try to explain how American literature has been observed through three case studies.Key words: American literature Chinese perspectives cross cultural

Author: Yang Jincai, Ph. D. in Literature, is professor of English at the Institute of Foreign Literature, Nanjing University and editor-in-chief of Contemporary Foreign Literature (Nanjing 210023, China). His research areas cover American literature and critical theories. Email: jcyang@

标题：美国文学的中国视野

内容摘要：中国对美国文学的接受过程很好地体现了文学批评的相机性和语境化特点，当批评涉及到价值与意义的跨文化讨论时尤其如此。只要粗略看看中国各大高校和研究机构的图书馆目录，就能发现大量中国学者研究美国文学的文献资料，充分显示出中国的美国文学研究在当今中国的外国文学研究领域中所占的比重。可以说，每一位重要的美国作家被中国读者接受的过程都可以写一部书。本文将对中国的美国文学研究略作回顾，并通过若干个案分析简述中国学界对麦尔维尔、马克 吐温和莫里森三位美国作家的研究。关键词：美国文学 中国视野 跨文化

作者简介：杨金才，文学博士，南京大学外国文学研究所教授、《当代外国文学》主编，主要研究美国文学与批评理论。

The history of the reception of American literature in China may well be one of the most exemplary instances of the contingent and context-bound quality of literary judgment, particularly when it involves cross-cultural negotiations of value and significance. A cursory glance at any research library’s catalog in China would suggest Chinese perception of American literature is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in today’s Chinese scholarship on foreign literature. Each major American author’s reception in China would require a booklength study.

Yang Jincai: American Literature in Chinese Perspectives 23

Here I will start from a brief survey of Chinese scholarship on American literature and try to explain how American literature has been observed through three case studies.

Loomings. The earliest Chinese encounter with American literature can be traced back to April 22, 1872 when the famous Shanghai-based newspaper Shun Pao, also known as Shanghai Daily, published a Chinese version of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” titled “A Sleep of Seventy Years.” However, few Chinese scholars paid attention to American literature until the late 1920s when the Tsinghua University personnel, including Professor Ye Gongchao who later also wrote on the subject in the 1930s, introduced American writers in their Western literature courses. Ye Congchao turned out his essay “Poetry of T. S. Eliot” in The Journal of Tsinghua University in April 1934, which is counted as one of the rst attempts to create comprehensive scholarly appraisals of T. S. Eliot in China. American teachers at missionary schools across China also expounded upon American literature by surveying individual authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In 1926, noted scholar Zheng Zhenduo published “American Literature” in Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Short Story Magazine) surveying the early development of American literature. About 6 years later, Zhang Yuerui wrote a book, Meiguo Wenxue (American Literature), providing a more panoramic view of American literature.

A special issue of American literature appeared in the journal Xiandai (The Modern) in October 1934, offering a critical survey of modern American literature from Theodore Dreiser to William Faulkner. It maintains that Modern American literature is largely associated with American nation building, independence, and creativity (“现代美国文学专号导言” 837). The editors of the issue hailed enthusiastically the birth of American literature fermented by freedom and liberty which, having shattered the control of European tradition, is now beginning to exert its in uence on other literatures (838). Its development has set up a ne example for the Chinese literati who feel urged to construct a national literature of their own (839). Chinese critics at the time were particularly perspicacious and reviewed in their eeting discussions the major leading American literary gures in the rst two decades of the 20th century. They are T. S. Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London, to name only a few.

Unfortunately from 1935 to 1944, China was shaken by both Civil War and the Anti-Japanese War. Reading American literature was too much of a luxury for ordinary Chinese people. The whole nation was afflicted by disasters and casualties resulting from the wars. For nearly ten years, the Chinese study of American literature was suspended. American literature gradually disappeared from academic papers and articles before it was again attended to in the 1940s when China became enthusiastic about the re-introduction of American literature. Many Chinese intellectuals believed that it was necessary for them to introduce American literature in China so as to foster a national literature. A case in point is the 1941 project to publish in translation eighteen American literary books from different periods. Many of them were chosen at random mainly out of a translator’s personal interest. One of the earliest undertakings was Feng Yidai’s full translation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men published in 1941. He also translated Lillian

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Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine in 1944. Melville’s Moby-Dick was also selected for the translation project, but only a few chapters were translated. Instead of being published as a complete book for the project, it was later excerpted in a different two-volume book Oumei Xiaoshuo Mingzhu Jinghua (Essentials of European and American Fiction) published in Chongqing in 1944. Take Herman Melville for example, a complete Chinese version of his Moby-Dick did not come out until 1957 and its translator Cao Yong was generally faithful to the 1930 Modern Library edition, except for the exclusion of “Etymology” and “Extracts.”

After 1949, China, having gone through so many years of revolution and chaotic wars, was entering a phase of nation building for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Its literary arena was once again shifted to one of more political concerns. Only those works considered favorable to the construction of New China could fare well while most Western classics were termed inappropriate or useless. Also due to the American government’s close involvement in Asian and Southeast Asian affairs and its continuous support on the side of the defeated Nationalists in Taiwan, the relationship between PRC and the United States was tense in the 1950s during which the U. S. was regarded as an imperialist nation. Anything American was refuted in China. Thus, the publication project of eighteen American literary books was suspended, without fulfilling its proposed purpose by its designers. This abrupt end of the project was mainly due to the diplomatic tension between the two nations. China was at the moment turning to the Soviet Union for ideological support to construct its socialism. American literature soon fell out of sight in the 1950s, but the 1940s and its preceding decades could be the rst stage of Chinese projections of American writers that marks China’s burgeoning interest in American literature partially featured by a passion for Western literature as both cultural and intellectual nourishment.

What followed was a period (roughly from 1960 to 1976) in which literature and art were utterly dominated by an “ultra-Left” ideology. Nearly all Western thought except Marxism was ruthlessly attacked as anti-socialism. Only a few American authors such as Herman Melville and Walt Whitman were treated better, for they were regarded either as critics of Western capitalism or liberators and revolutionary models. It is widely known in China that Whitman embodied both democracy and liberty.

Interest in American literature gained momentum after the Cultural Revolution. One relevant factor that contributed to this growth was the gradual liberalization of Chinese political life after 1979, with its more open response to Western culture, writers, and theories, which for almost twenty years had been of cially forbidden. In the late 1970s, a second phase of wide interest in American literature occurred when China slowly walked away from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese literary scholars could face Western literature again. A case in point is Dong Hengxun, who took the lead in editing A Short History of American Literature. In 1981 a quarterly journal named Meiguo wenxue congkan (American Literature in Series) was established to approach contemporary American literary works. As is claimed in its first issue, the journal aims to know better American society and its current thoughts through reading literary works. It is highly stated that the study of American literature in China should be contributive to the nation’s building-up of socialist literature (吴富恒 3-4).

Yang Jincai: American Literature in Chinese Perspectives 25

Of greater academic value, perhaps, but certainly less compendious is the 2002 version of a more comprehensive literary history of the United States known as Xinbian meiguo wenxueshi

(A New Literary History of the United States) in four volumes. It is a monumental and effort-taking project of highly credible studies prepared by noted scholars across China headed by both Liu Haiping and Wang Shouren at Nanjing University. The magnitude of its task is commendable awaiting anyone wishing to read nearly everything written about American literature. Anyone trying to gain some comprehensive understanding of Chinese critical perspectives on American literature soon recognizes his or her debt to dozens of scholars who have taken on the painstaking and often thankless task of identifying and indexing the massive body of secondary source materials.

In terms of text selection and theoretical approaches American literature scholarship in China from its burgeoning phase in the 1930s to the 2010s is quite varied. Early critics like Zhao Jiabi, Zheng Zhenduo and Zhang Yuerui in the 1930s pointed out the paths worth pursuing. The papers published in the last two decades of the twentieth century, even if inspired by a period’s society-oriented scholarship, departed from merely historicist approaches and focused on individual author’s artistic project, applying the theoretical tools of structuralism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, cultural criticism, or gender studies, but Chinese scholarship on American literature in the twenty- rst century advances steadily with its signi cant departure from social concerns, giving rise to a more sophisticated boom of critical observations featured by incorporated approaches such as comparative and sociopolitical ones. Here are three case studies.

First, Herman Melville. Throughout the 1980s, Melville studies in China were characterized by little reference to American scholarship. The Chinese critical fervor during the period featured a focus on the “gloominess of Melville.” The bulk of Chinese criticism discusses Melville’s depictions of blackness in relation to abstract metaphysical concepts. More often than not they quote from Melville’s review essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” to argue that Melville’s own writing re ects what he describes as “that blackness in Hawthorne.” They contend that Melville also had a great power in him that “derives its force from appeals to that Calvinist sense of innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free” (楼光庆 13). These critical views remind us of what Richard Brodhead has observed in his well-written monograph The School of Hawthorne.

From the 1990s on, comparative studies of Melville and his contemporaries or disciples began to claim a fuller place in Chinese academe. A cluster of scholarly essays published in the decade juxtaposed Melville and other authors, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Hawthorne, William Golding, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and Joseph Heller, who had been far better known in China.

Heading into the twenty- rst century, Melville scholarship in China has advanced in varied ways. In terms of text selection and theoretical approaches Melville Studies in the 2000s has differed from that of the 1990s. As far as translation is concerned, more than ten unabridged Chinese versions of Moby-Dick have come out in addition to the translations of Typee, Omoo, and Mardi in 2006. The most ambitious Melville publishing venture of the 1990s was the translation of Moby-Dick. Various Chinese editions of the novel appeared within less than a

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decade. Translations of other works during the time also show China’s enthusiasm for Melville. The release of Billy Budd in 2003 let Chinese readers and literary scholars discover what other hidden treasures lurked inside Melville’s writing. Introductions to translations of Melville’s ction have also stressed that his narratives are equivocal, demanding a more committed, systematic reading of his works. Emphasizing the means and implications of Melville’s ction, this phase has changed the focus of Chinese Melvillean research. Two trends are evident: one stressing reading and Melville’s extended readerships, the other treating his unique style of writing from various literary perspectives.

The brisk publication of Melville’s works has augmented Chinese scholars’ unrelenting efforts in Melville studies. In contrast with the comparative approaches of the last two decades of the twentieth century, critics now depart from the traditional trajectory of biographical and historicist approaches and focus on Melville’s artistic project including his manipulation of narration, characterization, and writing technique.

Many critical studies appearing in the 1990s and 2000s—most in the form of articles written for scholarly journals such as Foreign Literature Review, Foreign Literature Studies, Foreign Literature, and Foreign Literatures Quarterly—address theoretical issues. Chinese scholars have started to observe Melville from theoretical perspectives. More often than not they would turn to the ongoing American scholarship for critical inspiration. For example, I have recently drawn from some of the most consequential theoretical developments of the last three decades in philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism to analyze Melville’s works. My studies take account of ve trends in innovative critical thought: recent theories of power, as articulated by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler; theories of trauma and testimony developed by Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth; the new thinking of ethics, articulated by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida; the New Historicism; and the postcolonial logic derived from Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. My Herman Melville and Imperialism: A Cultural Critique of Melville’s Polynesian Trilogy delves into the macropolitics of Typee, Omoo, and Mardi and treats them as products of a sudden uidity of textual modes and strategies that Melville perceived and recorded.

Second, Mark Twain. Since the mid-1980s Chinese Twain scholars have tried to incorporate contemporary Western critical theories into their approaches. They have gradually abandoned the stereotyped model of “exposure and satire” and begun to approach his aesthetical realm, displaying a wide interest in Twain’s long-neglected minor works. Foreign Literature Studies carried in 1986 an article titled “The Three Phases of Twain’s Composition”, which observed Mark Twain as a humorist, maintaining that Twain’s humor is not all along withering satire but light-hearted, comical and jocose as well (沈培錩 60-65, 59). Follow-up researches also stand out dealing with Twain’s “putative artistic loopholes” (王迪生 3-8) as well as his underestimated ability of “cultivating melancholy” (董衡巽 3).

Another signi cant feature of this period’s Twain studies is that scholars began to incorporate disciplines other than literary studies such as anthropology and ethnology into a diversi ed frame of criticism. In 1999, for instance, the 4th issue of the Journal of Zhejiang University published

Yang Jincai: American Literature in Chinese Perspectives 27

an anthropological study of Twain titled “Huckleberry Finn and the Rites of Passage”, revealing the “conflicts between culture and personality, society and individual, selfness and otherness”, and the primitive unconscious positioned in the writer’s mind (张德明 91-97). This study offers another thought-provoking observation of the work’s local cultural features in question. In 2006, there appeared in the 5th issue of Foreign Literature Studies a study of racism in American literature entitled The Indians in the 19th-Century White American Literary Classics, in which Twain is critiqued as an advocate for “white colonialism” (邹惠玲 45-51). Obviously, such a view is oversimpli ed as regards Twain’s sympathetic attitudes towards other ethnic minorities such as African Americans and Chinese immigrants. In 2003, Foreign Literature Review released an article probing into Twain’s perception of China from a post-colonial perspective. For the rst time in China, Twain was seen as both a humanitarian and an Orientalist (崔丽芳 123-130).

It may be claimed that Chinese observation of Twain since the mid-1980s has gradually departed from a simplistic political/ideological reading and become more committed to an exploration of a true Twain. In short, Twain’s writings, as these and other critical studies suggest, are now commonly read as comprehensive manifestations of a variety of nineteenth-century American cultural phenomena.

Looking back on Twain’s centennial passage in China, we find that Twain has earned a large measure of Chinese popularity though he often stands at the crossroads, just like a statue, frequently passed by and quite well known to us, but far from being perused. There is still in Twain’s literary hoard plenty of treasure that may be worthy of further exploration. While we read notable fruits of academic Twain studies in the United States, especially in recent years, when American Twain scholars have begun to incorporate into their approaches the results of innovative criticism of the writer, there has also occasioned the most intense period of the critical reception of Twain in China, which provides readers with comprehensive analyses of the major writings and motifs of a canonized master of world literature.

Third, Toni Morrison. Reception of Morrison in China shows a reading of the author which is not univocal. From the highly autobiographical reception, characterized rst by Hu Yunhuan, who notes Morrison’s potential to be a “great culturally rooted African American writer” (胡

exive author, to a variety of theoretical 允桓 241), to a more close reading of Morrison as a re

perspectives and a fully edged academic approach, the reception of Morrison in China has come full circle. A recently released paper titled “A Mercy and the Ideal Home under Construction” by Hu Jun is illustrative of this. It offers a new perspective into the novel, arguing that Morrison unfolds in it her thoughtful reflection on the United States as a nation. Here, Hu contends that Morrison is not satisfied with the United States as an immigrant nation and interrogates provocatively the identity of American citizens, for she strongly believes American history does not belong to the Whites only, but to all races instead (胡俊202-203).

In terms of text selection and theoretical approaches Morrison studies in China in the 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s is quite varied. Chinese readers were not unanimous about Morrison during those periods of burgeoning interest, and ideology strongly in uenced the reception of the African American author, whose humanistic values and art were sometimes totally misunderstood.

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This was of course the case in China in the 1980s when Chinese critics were still driven by the tenets of orthodox socio-realism. Many critics of the day were keen on how an American author exposed social evils in capitalist and racist America. Unexceptionally, they would approach racial discrimination and social oppression in Morrison’s ction while her aesthetics was largely ignored. Not until the 1990s did Chinese scholars gradually give up their traditional mindset and begin to perceive Morrison as a literary artist. It is just this monumental change that has brought about an abundance of Morrison scholarship in China.

There has occurred a brisk publication of individual monographs on Toni Morrison in the past decade or so. 12 individual books have been published on her since the 2000s, many of which are in fact expanded versions of their doctoral dissertations in addition to a collection of critical essays titled Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Fiction. This fruitful scholarship on Morrison reveals that Chinese critics have made a great deal of efforts in promoting Morrison in China. Their individual discussions are precise and useful in providing a gateway into Morrison’s ction for both students and general readers who might not be familiar with her work. In these books, one can encounter various comprehensive analyses of the major writings and motifs of the African American woman writer.

At the turn of the Twenty-first century, it appears that American literary studies in China gradually follow the general movement beyond poststructuralism. Rehistoricization and recontextualization are at work, and anti-formalist enterprises are associated with development of cultural and gender studies. The best readings of American literature are still trying to reconcile textual investigation and cultural considerations and this is the reason why careful attention has been paid to the semiological contiguity between verbal and non-verbal languages.

The future of American literary studies in China is grounded in many of the works I consider here. Any study of American literature by a Chinese scholar, of course, necessarily privileges some writers over others. As has been demonstrated in the previous case studies, I have tried to include in each part important voices in shaping an author’s reputation. The number of degree theses on American authors and their works has been growing steadily in China since 1980, yielding unprecedented outputs of scholarship. Today, editions of various American works are generally available in Chinese bookstores and libraries. English editions with Chinese footnotes are standard texts in Chinese colleges and universities. Reviewers, scholars, and degree candidates in China are now joining hands to fathom the complexities in American literature. Hence the uniqueness of this critical trend might be envisioned in its attempt to reinstate the cultural symmetry between Anglo-American and Chinese studies on American literature. While responding to the Anglo-American tradition of criticism, Chinese scholars are also making efforts to found their own.

引用作品【Works Cited】

崔丽芳：“马克 吐温的中国观”，《外国文学评论》4 (2003): 123-130。

[Cui Lifang. “Mark Twain’s Perception of China.” Foreign Literature Review 4 (2003): 123-30.]

Yang Jincai: American Literature in Chinese Perspectives 29

董衡巽：“马克 吐温短篇小说三篇”，《外国文学》1 (1988): 3。

[Dong Hengxun. “Three Short Stories of Mark Twain’s.” Foreign Literature 1(1988): 3.]

胡俊：“《一点慈悲》：关于‘家’的建构”，《外国文学评论》3 (2010): 200-210。

[Hu Jun. “A Mercy and the Ideal Home under Construction.” Foreign Literature Review 3 (2010): 200-10.]

胡允桓：“黑色的宝石——黑人女作家托妮 莫瑞森”，《美国当代小说家论》，钱满素编。北京：中国

社会科学出版社，1987年。225-243。

[Hu Yunhuan. “A Black Star—Approaching the African American Writer Toni Morrison.” Critical Essays on

Contemporary American Novelists. Ed. Qian Mansu. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1987. 225-43.]“现代美国文学专号导言”，《现代》5-6 (1934): 834-838。

[“Introduction to the Special Issue on Modern American Literature.” Modern 5-6 (1934): 834-38.]

楼光庆：《梅尔维尔的<白鲸>》，《课外学习》4 (1985): 12-17。

[Lou Guangqing. “On Melville’s Moby-Dick.” Out-of-Class Learning 4 (1985): 12-17.]

沈培锠：“马克 吐温创作的三个时期”，《外国文学研究》3 (1986): 60-65, 59。

[Shen Peichang. “The Three Phases of Twain’s Composition.” Foreign Literature Studies 3 (1986): 60-65, 59.]王迪生：“《汤姆 索亚历险记》简论”，《外国文学研究》1 (1987): 3-8。

[Wang Disheng. “A Short View of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Foreign Literature Studies 1 (1987): 3-8.]吴富恒：“创刊词”，《美国文学丛刊》1 (1981): 2-4。

[Wu Fuheng. “Inception Foreword.” American Literature in Series 1 (1981): 2-4.]

Yang Jincai. Herman Melville and Imperialism: A Cultural Critique of Melville’s Polynesian Trilogy. Nanjing:

Nanjing UP, 2001.

张德明：“《哈克贝利 芬历险记》与成人仪式”，《浙江大学学报》4 (1999): 91-97。

[Zhang Deming. “Huckleberry Finn and the Rite of Passage.” Zhejiang University Journal 4 (1999): 91-97.]邹惠玲：“19世纪美国白人文学经典中的印第安形象”，《外国文学研究》5 (2006): 45-51。

[Zou Huiling. “The Indians in the 19th-Century White American Literary Classics.” Foreign Literature Studies 5

(2006): 45-51.]责任编辑：四 维

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