| Born into an ordinary family, Lao She played an important part in the Chinese contemporary literature history. His works, together with the novel writings of Mao Dun and Ba Jin, consist of the three peaks of Chinese contemporary novels. It took him forty years to create his unique world of literature, and special contribution was made to the construction and development of China's new literature.It has almost been eighty-five years since researches were conducted on Lao's works in China, and over sixty years in the United States. That was a huge deal of work. The westerners used to be amazed by Shakespeare studies:It seems that the poetry of Shakespeare will disappear beneath the great mass of comment that has been written upon it. It would be least exaggerating if we borrow his comment to depict Lao She studies.When making a general survey of Lao She studies at home and abroad, we cans the researches are fruitful. But still, the potential of research fields among Lao She's achievement is huge. When compared with his creation works in terms of volume, Lao She's translation works will just seem like a drop in the ocean. However, their research values can never be underestimated. And if we could investigate the intertextality of his translations and creation works, Lao She's importance will be more prominent in Chinese contemporary literature history, Chinese comparative literature history and overseas Chinese literature history.Chapter One. Lao She and Chinese literature traditions. This chapter analyses Lao She's inheritance and innovation of traditions in his creation works from the following three aspects:folk sword fighting culture, historical biography traditions and humor.Chapter Two. Lao She's vision of world literature and his selective acceptance. Chinese contemporary literature is formed under the influence of the west. But when the Chinese writers were accepting the western literature, the pre-understanding, namely Chinese writing traditions, were constraining their acceptance of the western literature, the process and the factors of the acceptance. Lao She's vision of world literature decides his relationship with the western literature, like his translation and acceptance of Schopenhauer's works, his acceptance of Dante's works and those of the Russian writers. Besides, the advance from writing skills, structures, language regulations, rhetoric devices and techniques to the absorption of literary spirit and ultimately back to domestic traditions is also up to Lao She's vision of world literature. Although literature could not equal to life, it could not exist independently with out life. Ultimately, literature could not avoid the question of how people live a life. Only when a literature work is led in through the perspective of life could it gain this literature work nationality and success. The success of Lao She's novel writings are a best representation of this notion. This chapter points out the connection between life and intellectual production itself. This connection just presents intellectual's non-concept character, which does not mean a cancellation of concept operation, but a cancellation of the materialization and absolutization of concept. When literature works establish an interactive relationship, they can obtain the initiative and likelihood of success.Chapter Three. The multi-language writing and being written:translation and being translated. This chapter, which chooses the writer's translation works as the subject and with the guidance of Chinese and western translation theories and comparative literature theories, will analyze how Lao She introduce the idiosyncrasy of foreign literature to the Chinese literary world, how he "fetches the meanings" to transform them into Chinese contemporary literature factors. In the1930s, different literature theory groups were numerous, and different ideas and criticisms were chaotic. Even though at the beginning of the1940s, Marxist literature theory dominated the literature concept, which led to a leaning to and crossing-boundary of heteronomy, it could not be ignored that in the social reproduction of literary integrity, before the domination of one literary concept, in the chaos of different groups of literature, this can promote the efforts to reproduce literary mechanism. Lao She's translation William Wordsworth in1932is such an example. At that time, the translation and introduction of "proletarian literature" and critical realism of Europe and the United States were spreading like a raging fire. Even through the way he translated William Wordsworth belonged to a marginal method, he used an independent perspective to illustrate a "mass literature" concept and constructed a popular language poetics. His way kept a distance with Lu Xun's concept of the public, namely going together with the ordinary people, and at the same time presented a sharp contrast. This also demonstrated a sense of social responsibility that where the intellectual literature should go to and inspired the Chinese contemporary literature how to develop and to communicate with other countries'literature. Take The Apple Cart as another example. When language was used as a tool of ideology, Lao She ingeniously transformed the patron-demanded "the class nature of language" from a certain language form belongs to a certain class to language contains the special demands of class. This helped translation become the complementation and interaction of two languages and thus, a new writing style of drama was introduced in.Chapter Four."Chinese narration" in Lao She's multi-cultural vision. This chapter is a further investigation of the previous one. Lao She's translation works of his own writings are the research subjects, and other translator's corresponding works act as a reference. This chapter will discuss when Lao She was doing multi-language narration, how he spread literature and culture and create an image of a nation and the complexity of doing so under political pressure. Comparing Evan King's translation of Divorce and Lao She's own translation, we can find Evan King rewrote the original texts but there still existed an aesthetic representation or creation in the political sense. Lao She was discontented with it and he co-translated this novel. However, there exsits particularity in co-translation:even though they intended to represent the artistry in the original text, political factors unavoidably exist in the English translation. A suitable growing point was not reached between politics and literature. But this growing point formed unconsciously in The Spear That Demolishes Five Tigers at Once, which was adapted from The Deadly Spear.Chapter Five. Lao She's multi-language literature practice and construction of its literature relationship. This chapter summarizes Lao She's multi-language literature practice and construction of its literature relationship. In his long-term multi-language literature practice, writing and translation, despite the constraints of history, politics, context and literature field, Lao She had a very clear subject sense:literature should go beyond ideology, pursue truth, good and beauty of human nature, which exists in the mutual relationship of different "nationality" rather than existing in different "nationalities" with a certain universal form. The later is isolated from its own national literature, which means it could just depend on other's nationality and isolation from "literature" as well. From the case studies of Lao She's works together with his unique understanding of literature relationship, this chapter recollects the present research situation of Chinese-foreign literature relationship of contemporary comparative literature, and puts forward "perception of a survivability sense" as a new theoretical method to research literature relationship.The conclusion part sums up the research achievements of this thesis, its limitations and gives some ideas of how to expand research field.
|
PDF Full Text Request