Chinese culture as pre-text/pretext: A study of the treatment of Chinese sources by Ezra Pound, Pearl Buck and selected contemporary Chinese-American writers (Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin)

This project aims to establish that all the writers under study use Chinese culture as a pre-text/pretext to occasion their own literary creation. In a sense they all misread and misinterpret Chinese cultural texts. But their acts of "misreading" and "misunderstanding" should not be dismissed as merely individual, accidental, subjective responses. Instead, they should be viewed as products of peculiar points of view conditioned by these American writers' Western experiences before and during their encounter with the Chinese texts. They reflect the writers' ideology and the different worlds they inhabit. Their eventual presentations, or mis-presentations, of Chinese culture are determined by a number of factors, including the writers' interests and assumptions, their social backgrounds, literary views and historical situations. In the course of the dissertation, it will become clear that while the Chinese American writers' deliberate revisionist readings of Chinese culture may constitute acts of liberation, the "misreadings" of Pound and Buck represent different Western inventions of China. Pearl Buck's largely sympathetic presentation of China and the Chinese reflects, linguistically and thematically, her humanitarian Christian view. Ezra Pound's appropriation of Chinese culture, including his famous ideogrammic method and his interpretation of Chinese history, was first and foremost informed by his politics and poetics. On the other hand, the Chinese American writers' "importation" and adaptation of Chinese heroes and stories can be viewed as part of their grand strategy to fight against injustice and discrimination of all kinds. However, in the process of crosscultural literary interpretation/fertilization, all the writers not only transform the original culture, they themselves also undergo transformation.