Man-eating, fiction, and culture: Of Chinese and Japanese corporeality

This study is about writing man-eating in fiction. Once eating the human body becomes a subject of fictional writing, the body enters a context of signification: it is turned from an edible raw material or food into a meta-text. Under this new semiotic condition, to "eat" the body is in a sense to re-signify it culturally. In the same sense, to write man-eating in fiction is to record or encode that signification. Similarly, to read the writing of fictional man-eating is to play back that record or to decode the messages out of that embedment. Fictional man-eating in this study is taken as an allegorical form of cultural expression. If man-eating is a taboo in human civilization, in fiction this taboo becomes accessible. If the eating in question allegorically delivers cultural information beyond the eating itself, then fiction provides a database for that information.;The texts of Chinese and Japanese fiction for this project are quite diverse. The grounds for comparison are not conventionally chronological. They are, rather, thematic and theoretical. All the arguments in this study are directed toward this hypothesis: the purpose of writing man-eating in fiction--or more specifically, in the texts of Chinese and Japanese fiction studied here--is to civilize rather than to barbarize. In the man-eating episodes discussed in this study, there are not only conflicts between civilization and barbarism, but also negotiation and exchange between the two. The man-eating drama in question illustrates as well that civilization is a difficult and complex process, in which many civilizing attempts, intents, and rationalizations are resisted or hindered. The fictional man-eating in question involves also a different conflict. As far as the chosen texts are concerned, there are some shared paradigms or patterns in the cultural drama performed through fictional man-eating: e.g., the reconciliation, negotiation, displacement, or transformation between Self and Other, or more specifically, between self-effort and help, power from within and power from without, free-will and discipline, cultivation and salvation. These patterns in fictional man-eating warrant an intertextual study of the different Chinese and Japanese texts put together in this dissertation.