Echoes Of China:Nicholas Jose's Transcultural Writing In Avenue Of Eternal Peace And The Red Thread

Nicholas Jose(1952-)has won his literary reputation as one of the Australian distinguished contemporary writers and is best known for his works on a wide range of issues of contemporary Australian and Asian art and literature.Jose's first-hand knowledge and his immersion in Chinese culture and traditions are charted in his literary journey.Till now,three of his seven novels typically provide a running theme of China,including Avenue of Eternal Peace(1989),The Rose Crossing(1994)and The Red Thread(2000).The stories of Avenue of Eternal Peace and The Red Thread are set in China.Like a black swan of trespass,both novels transcend western and eastern cultures and bear a vision of cross-cultural understanding,whereas a sense of ambivalence bespeaks Jose himself as well as his transcultural writing.Specific cultural context occasions its corresponding textual reading.In this case,a transcultural way of critiquing attunes more to the cultural complexities of our globalized contemporaneity.Under this framework,this dissertation aims to disclose,describe and underline the complex and always-on dynamics of cultural encounters,transformations,and negotiations.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter one starts with a brief introduction of Nicholas Jose and his works,then summarizing the critical reception of him and the two fiction,displaying the originality and organization of the thesis.Chapter two examines the theoretical underpinnings,outlining a brief historical trajectory of the transcultural and proceeding by probing the transcultural literary studies in Australia especially the main points of Italian-Australian scholar Arianna Dagnino's transcultural paradigm in contemporary western literary criticism.The body part is composed of the next three chapters.It digs Nicholas Jose's nuanced and complicated view of China and its culture by pointing out the edifying moments and his ambivalence presented in the two novels.Basically there are three strategies adopted in his cultural translation-foreignizing,hybridizing and anastomosing.By translating the differences that are foreign to each other and mainly embodied in linguistic and cultural immersion,the gaps of interpretation could possibly be filled.Through hybridizing,the linguistic,literary and cultural interactions of the east and the west actualize the aesthetic and transcultural effects of mixing,permeating and collision of multiple languages and cultures within literary texts.Also,seen from the wording and purport of his representation,Australia and China(west and east)anastomose extensively and specifically,which composes an idealized dimension of transculturation.Chapter five attributes Jose's writing with dual identity and the convoluted writing context to the sense of ambivalence appearing in him and his transcultural writing.Chapter six gives a summary of this thesis.The ambivalence is nonetheless edifying,denoting an uncertainty about perceiving China as the absolute other.It is making a wrecking ball demolish the wall between each other and triggering new visions that do originate in Jose's Asian writing.Both books and Jose himself shed light on the mutability of culture.His writing with dual identity demonstrates his commitment to transcending the divergence between east and west to create productive interconnectedness.