A Study Of Eileen Chang's Self-translation Strategies From The Perspective Of Transtextuality

Eileen Chang is an outstanding bilingual writer and translator in Chinese literature history.As a bilingual Chinese writer,she composes Chinese and English novels.As a translator,besides translating novels of other writers,she also translates her own works.Her self-translations have been studied from the perspectives of feminism,functional equivalence,manipulation theory,rewriting theory,postcolonial theory and others.However,few researches are conducted from the perspective of transtextuality theory.Transtextuality,proposed by French scholar Gerard Genette,is all the factors combining a text with others.Generated from intertextuality by Julia Kristeva,transtextuality also admits the relationship of one text with another,but it analyzes a text on a structural level at which Genette purposes five types of transtextual relationships: transtextuality,paratextuality,metatextuality,architextuality and hypertextuality.It must be noted that,the terminology “intertextuality” in Genette's theory is only one of the five types of the transtextual relationships and its scope is reduced to the actual appearance of one text within another.Little Finger Up is self-translated by Eileen Chang from its Chinese version Deng(???).The novel mainly talks about the miserable life of women in Japanese-held Shanghai during the second Anti-Japanese War.Set in a massage clinic where a few women are waiting and talking about their misery,the novel reveals that life is full of distressed waiting.Compared with other self-translation works by Chang,only a few studies were conducted on Little Finger Up.In order to supplement the study of the novel and deepen the understanding of Eileen Chang's self-translation,Little Finger Up is chosen in this thesis as a case study to explore the self-translation strategies of Eileen Chang through transtextual relationships and the factors leading to these strategies.To solve the problems mentioned above,this thesis has focused on the following questions: 1)What self-translation strategies does Eileen Chang adopt in her Little Finger Up from the perspective of transtextuality? 2)What are the internal and external factors behind these strategies? 3)How do the internal and external factors interact?Based on Gerard Genette's transtextuality theory,this thesis has explored Chang's self-translation strategies through three types of transtextual relationships.The first one is paratextuality where the footnotes,parentheses and preface are focused on.Paratexts can help to present a text and its illocutionary force manifests many contents that might not be seen in the main text.The second one,architextuality,is concerned with duration and there is a distinguishing feature in Little Finger Up when Eileen Chang self-translates her own work: the alternation of scene and descriptive pause in dialogue.The third one is hypertextuality.This part explores the transformation of the title,the transformation of characters' names,amplification,reduction and plot rearrangement.Through such massive changes,it can be concluded that self-translation is a modification process for Eileen Chang to extend the life of her works.After the transtextual analysis,this thesis finds out that Chang combines foreignization and domestication in her self-translation and that the alternation of scene and descriptive pause is used in the dialogues of Little Finger Up.Then this thesis probes into the internal and external factors that affect these transtextual relationships and the interaction between the internal and external factors.It has been found that internal factors include “the influence of anxiety” and Chang's reader-orientation pursuit and that the external factors involve social environment and ideology.This thesis not only complements researches on Eileen Chang's self-translation,but hopefully can prove the explanatory power of transtextuality theory as well.Finally,this thesis promotes the application of transtextuality theory and brings in a new angle for self-translation study.