Shi Zhecun's fiction and translated modernity

Translation, since the Late Qing Dynasty, has been exhibiting great influence on China's road towards modernity. Scholars Lydia Liu and David Wang present "translated modernity" as a way to delve into the relationship between translation, Chinese Late Qing fiction and May Fourth literature. From Late Qing to May Fourth, translation has been highly influential on the period when old literature was superseded by new one. Thus, when radical anti-traditionalism wanes, would translation, among the relatively mature 30s literature, have a new significance?This paper concentrates on the discussion of the relationship between 1930s Chinese modern writer Shi Zhecun and "translated modernity." The basic assumption behind this paper is that the work of fiction by Shi Zhecun is a kind of translingual practice, which is inextricably bound up with translation. It is through such a broad sense of translational activity that Shi Zhecun began his pursuit of modernity and finally obtained a kind of modernity different from the Western, the translated modernity. Looking from the perspective of translingual practice, the fictional work by Shi Zhecun is never an isolated mental work, but the consequence of cultural exchange and vigorous bombardment between Chinese and Western literature. On one hand, his fiction fails to stand outside of the progress of modernity in China, while his work is also deeply embedded in the network of Western literature on the other hand. By mean of a series of mimicry, appropriation and rewriting, he translates text from various times, spaces and media into his own work. In the fiction by Shi Zhecun, we may see the process of how foreign literature and other cultural factors rise, circulate and eventually gain legitimacy in the 1930s China. At the same time, we can also know of how they have changed the observation and conception of modern Chinese writers towards literature and the outer world. Therefore, not only does fiction by Shi Zhecun comprise the modernity experience of Shanghai, a metropolitan city in the 1930s, to synchronize with the world, but they also record responses and changes of modern Chinese fiction in the face of the progress of modernism.This paper is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter is an introduction, which briefly introduces the background of investigation of Shi Zhecun's fiction and expounds the theoretical framework of "translated modernity". Chapter two to six are the core part of this paper. By introducing related literary and cultural theories, they serve to probe into fiction by Shi Zhecun. Chapter two draws an outline of historical materials and observes the frequent mimicry and rewriting phenomena on his early work with regard to his fictional work and translational activities, in order to grasp how he transplants forms and techniques from the Western fiction into the Chinese situation. Chapter three deepens discussion on the previous chapter and examines how Shi Zhecun employs western psychoanalytic method and narrative mechanism in his "old stories retold" to construct the interiority unique to modern fiction. Chapter four intervenes from the viewpoint of technologized visuality to analyze the relationship between psychoanalytic fiction by Shi Zhecun and modern visual text. Through the discussion of mode of space in fiction, chapter five looks at how Shi Zhecun's fiction transform modern urban space into fictional text, producing a range of thoughts concerned with modernity. Chapter six, by reconstructing his literal tradition, interprets the traditional elements found in his fiction and analyzes with different aspects his re-creation of Chinese traditional literature. Chapter seven is the conclusion, which attempts to consolidate what has been discussed before in this text, in order to contemplate the important significance of modernity in China brought about by Shi Zhecun's fiction.