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CONTEMPORARY FOREIGN LITERATURE
Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 2014)
ABSTRACTS
Constructing One’s Own Universe:
A Thematic Study of John Barth’s The Floating Opera
ABSTRACT: Though nihilism is a major theme of John Barth’s The Floating Opera, as some
scholars have observed, the novel reflects the author’s optimistic rather than pessimistic attitude
towards life. This paper studies the novel thematically by focusing on its historical background
and writing process. As an author with a strong sense of social and historical responsibilities,
Barth explores the origins of the universe and the ultimate meaning of human life.
Keywords: The Floating Opera, nihilism, nature of existence
Author: Jiang Daochao < [email protected] > is a professor at School of Foreign
Languages of Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China (518060), specializing in modern and
contemporary American literature.
Every Third Thought and John Barth’s View of Contemporary Literature
ABSTRACT: John Barth’s 2011 novel Every Third Thought embodies the author’s reflections
upon contemporary literature. Firstly, Barth examines contemporary literature in the context of
cultural history and expresses his view on high modernism by alluding to many literary figures of
the period, thereby revealing the relationship between culture and literature and mapping out the
contemporary literary scene. Secondly, through presenting a simulacrum of literary awards he
expresses a pessimistic view of literary prizes. Thirdly, he evaluates his own position in literary
history via parody and self-parody. Reviewing critical comments on the novel and referring to
Barth’s own literary theory, this article closely reads Every Third Thought as a manifest critique of
contemporary literature.
Keywords: Every Third Thought, John Barth, contemporary literature, literary prize
Author: Song Ming < [email protected] > is a PhD candidate at the School of Foreign
Languages, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China (200062). Her research interest is in
postmodern and contemporary literature.
Hybridizing and Blending: Richard Powers’s Narrative Strategies
ABSTRACT: As a leading figure of the new generation of American postmodernist novelists,
Richard Powers has not only inherited the postmodernist tradition from his predecessors, but also
complied with the information age to absorb a large quantity of scientific data into his fictional
discourse, bridging the gap between science and art. This paper contends that by hybridizing and
blending literary discourse with scientific discourse, postmodernism with realism, and narrative
with essayistic writing, Powers blends literature with science and manages to resolve the
postmodern narrative crisis, therefore making a successful defense of fiction in the information
age. Keywords: Richard Powers, narrative strategy, hybridizing, blending
Author: Sun Jian < [email protected] > is an associate professor at College of Foreign
Languages, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China (710061). His major research area is
contemporary British and American fiction.
Approaching the Postmodern Technique of Narrative Collage in “The Leather Man”
ABSTRACT: American postmodernist writer E. L. Doctorow effectively uses collages in his
writings to highlight features of postmodern literature, namely fragmentation, disarray,
marginalization and disunity. In his short story “The Leather Man”, Doctorow anatomizes modern
American society and reveals its hidden truth through three types of collage, including the collage
of narrative angels and discourses, the collage of historical events, and the collage of characters.
Questioning “facts” to expose the lies of power politics and create a de-authorizing effect, the
three types of collage impel readers to reconsider claims of historical truth and eventually realize
that both texts and facts are constructed, planted in a certain social context and conspired by a
certain interest group.
Keywords: “The Leather Man”, collage, lie, dissimilation, degrading, disunity
Authors: Long Yun < lovelife77@163. com > is an associate professor at School of English
Language, Literature and Culture of Beijing International Studies University, Beijing, China
(100024), specializing in British and American literature, comparative literature and western
literary criticism. Yang Meifang < 413361455@qq. com > is a postgraduate at School of English
Language, Literature and Culture of Beijing International Studies University, Beijing, China
(100024), specializing in British and American literature.
A Critical Survey of Norman Mailer Criticism
ABSTRACT: Norman Mailer has received both positive and negative reviews from literary critics.
This paper discusses four aspects of Mailer criticism, namely self-awareness, power, morality, and
chauvinism, and addresses their blind spots.
Keywords: Mailer, self-awareness, power, morality, chauvinism
Author: Xu Meihua < [email protected] > is a lecturer at School of International Relations,
Sichuan International Studies University, Chongqing, China (400031). Her academic interest is in
British and American literature.
Rewriting the Myth with Body Narrative:
The Feminist Strategy of Political Criticism in The Love of the Nightingale
ABSTRACT: Contemporary British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker rewrites the classical
Greek myth of Tereus with the strategy of body narrative in her 1989 drama The Love of the
Nightingale. The play casts limelight on the female body to show how women have been immured
and disciplined by the power mechanisms of patriarchy and, more importantly, demonstrates the
political potential of female body by exploring the possibilities and limits of women’s physical
resistance. The act of myth rewriting thus achieves keen political significance and ethical value,
confirming the body narrative as a key strategy in feminist criticism and activism.
Keywords: The Love of the Nightingale, myth rewriting, body narrative, feminist criticism
Authors: Chen Jing < [email protected] > is an associate professor at School of Foreign
Studies, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China (230011), specializing in twentieth-century
British and American drama; Hu Baoping < [email protected] > is a lecturer at School of
Foreign Studies, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China (510631), specializing in
British drama and British literary criticism.
Laying Down the Burdens:
Existentialist Reflections through Heterogeneous Narrative in Weight
ABSTRACT: As part of the “Myth Rewriting” series from Random House, Jeanette Winterson’s
novel Weight rewrites myth to free its characters from existential burdens. In this novel the
mythical Atlas casts the universe off his shoulders and the contemporary narrator keeps breaking
away from traps in life through self-exile. Moreover, the novel itself casts aside the burdens of
“Grand Narrative” and “Anxiety of Influence” by freely employing heterogeneous narrative
methods. Through a mixture of polyphonic private narration, heteroglossia and dialogue between
chronotopes, the novel reflects on the uniqueness of the individual, the absurdity of existence, the
necessity of responsibility and the relativity of freedom, endowing the classical myth of Atlas with
contemporary significance and renewed life.
Keywords: Jeanette Winterson, Weight, myth rewriting, heterogeneous narrative, existentialism
Author: Song Yanfang < [email protected] > is an associate professor of English at School of
Foreign Languages, Soochow University, Suzhou, China (215006). Her academic interest is in
British and American Literature.
Class, Religion and Sex:
Richard Mason’s History of a Pleasure Seeker as a Bildungsroman
ABSTRACT: History of a Pleasure Seeker, the latest novel written by the “literary wunderkind”
Richard Mason, integrates the seemingly disparate themes of class, religion and sex. As a
Bildungsroman, the novel addresses the class conflicts between characters and the shackles
imposed by religion upon humanity. Due to his personal charisma, Piet the protagonist
successfully surpasses barriers of class and social hierarchy to rise to his own prominence, and in
so doing frees Maarten, his master, from the fetters of religion to find his way back to humanity.
Keywords: Richard Mason, Bildungsroman, History of a Pleasure Seeker, class, sex
Author: Sun Shengzhong < [email protected] > is a professor at School of Foreign
Languages of Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, China (241002). His research interest is in British
and American literature, focusing on Bildungsroman in recent years.
Love and Mourning in Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life
ABSTRACT: Julian Barnes’ recent memoir Levels of Life voices a writer’s meditation on the
subject of love. Mourning the death of his wife, Barnes traces the universal journey of love as it
soars into the sky, falls to the ground and finally is buried in the tomb. The exposure of this
inevitable ending seems to deconstruct love, but the grief death brings about also fortifies one’s
belief in love. Even though to love means to suffer, Barnes tells us, love is the only hope we have.
Serving as a bond between history and individual, death and existence, mourning commemorates
and cements love, making Levels of life a humanistic exploration into life and its eternal meaning.
Keywords: Julian Barnes, Levels of Life, love, mourning
Author: Zhang Li < [email protected] > is an associate professor of English at School of
Foreign Languages, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China (450001). She specializes in British
and American literature.
Reconfiguring the Community Culture:
Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
ABSTRACT: A two-time Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel in her novels Wolf Hall and Bring
Up the Bodies vividly portrays the protagonist Thomas Cromwell as a glorious Tudor and a
powerful minister to show her unique vision of British history. In both novels she rewrites the
historical figure of Cromwell to reconceptualize English national identity and reconfigure the
English community culture. The “Englishness” of Cromwell as she depicts it reflects not only the
nation’s uniqueness but also its contemporary tolerance and diversity, thus creating new ways of
imagining and conceptualizing British national identity.
Keywords: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Cromwell, Englishness,
community culture
Author: Yan Chunmei < wyxycm@qzu. zj. cn > is an associate professor at School of Foreign
Languages of Quzhou University, Zhejiang, China (324000), specializing in British and American
literature.
Consuming India in Midnight’s Children
ABSTRACT: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with its allegorical historiography on Indian
Independence, has been critically acclaimed as a classic of postcolonial fiction. Under the
influence of commercialization, however, even Indian resistance in postcolonial fiction has been
turned into an object of consumption for mainstream British readers. The India portrayed in
Midnight’s Children has been exoticized and fetishized in British mass culture, echoing a feeling
of nostalgia for the British Raj that was prevalent during the 1980s.
Keywords: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, consuming India, nostalgia
Author: Su Chen < [email protected] > is an associate professor at School of International
Studies of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China (310058), specializing in British and American
literature.
Pages from Tarusa and the Thaw Literature of the Soviet Union
ABSTRACT: Scholars of Russian literature home and abroad have long overlooked the
significance of literary anthologies that appeared during the “thawing” period of Soviet literature.
This essay takes the anthology Pages from Tarusa as an example of such publications from that
particular period. The anthology, whose compilation process subverted the directives of the United
Writers Association of the Soviet Union as laid out by Stalin, suggests that writers should have the
freedom to form their own communities according to shared politics, aesthetics and tastes. This
suggestion has replaced or thawed the rigid official conceptualizations of literature and together
with non-official works, motivated the deconstruction of official literature and the construction of
a united Soviet literature.
Keywords: literary miscellany, Pages from Tarusa, Thaw literature
Author: Yang Zheng < [email protected] > is a senior lecturer at School of Foreign Studies,
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023). His research interests cover Russian literature and
comparative literature.
On the Feminist Impact of Kamala Das’s Confessional Poems
ABSTRACT: A major contemporary Indian poet, Kamala Das distinguishes herself in the Indian
literary world with her direct and bold writing style. Her confessional poems explore the private
lives of women, express their rich delicate feelings, delve into their complicated psychology and
painful experience caught in gender relations, thereby revealing the process of women’s
awakening. These poems break the silence of women to foreground a sharpened feminist
awareness. Addressing masculine hegemony in Indian culture and representing Indian women’s
painful self-rescue, Das’s poetry achieves a universal feminist impact.
Keywords: Indian English poetry, Kamala Das, feminism, confessional mode
Author: Wang Chunjing < [email protected] > is an associate professor and a post-doctoral
researcher at the Chinese Language and Literature College, Hebei Normal University,
Shijiazhuang, China (050024). Her major research field is Indian English literature.
Food and Drink in Günter Grass’s Works
ABSTRACT: Food and drink feature heavily in Günter Grass’s works, reflecting the implicit,
complicated and interesting relationships between gastronomy and literary narration, history,
power, civilization, the role of women, and meaning of life. Eating and drinking not only satisfy
the human need for sensual pleasure but also embody the influence of cultures and religions.
While often related to ease, warmth, security, communication and oral narration, food and drink
can also symbolize death and disaster.
Keywords: Günter Grass, food and drink, narration, history, women
Author: Zhang Xinyi < [email protected] > is a lecturer of German at School of Foreign
Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023).
The Strategies of Cultural Intervention in Song of Solomon
ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the complicated relationships among four main characters in
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon to show the strategies she employs as a writer to construct her
political paradigm. In this novel, female characters tactically manifest weakness to empower their
voice within the family, thereby rewriting traditional feminism to a certain extent. Black aesthetics
embodied by the call-and-response technique and locomotive images in the blues music enable
Morrison to question the mainstream value system and disrupt the assimilating white discourses.
She also resorts to immersion narratives to reveal the structure of power and ideology underlying
grand histories, calling for ethnic groups’ return to their national roots to gain subjectivity and
achieve social demarginalization. Through these strategies of cultural intervention, Song of Solomon realizes Morrison’ s dream of unifying politics and poetics in literature.
Keywords: Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, power structure, blues, immersion narrative
Author: Jing Xingmei < 1143941993® qq. com > is an associate professor at School of Foreign
Languages, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China (214122). Her research interests cover British and
American literature.
The Genealogy and Contemporary Significance of “the Uncanny”
ABSTRACT: The concept of “the uncanny” has an important place in western literary and
cultural theories. The inception of this concept has been attributed largely to Sigmund Freud’s
1919 essay “The Uncanny”, which was ignored upon its publication but since the 1970s has
attracted an increasing number of thinkers, critics and theorists to theorize and combine its
psychoanalytical and existentialist perspectives. The concept of “the uncanny”, with its aesthetic
negativity, has thus functioned as an illustration of aesthetic modernity. This article analyzes “the
uncanny” at the crossroads of psychoanalysis, existentialism and aesthetics to demonstrate the
contemporary relevance of the concept.
Keywords: the uncanny, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, existentialism, aesthetic modernity
Author: Wang Suying < [email protected] > is an associate professor at College of Foreign
Languages and Literature, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China (050024). Her
researches focus on western literary theory and criticism, as well as British and American
literature.
Deconstruction Encountering Humanism:
An Academic Debate Thirty Years Ago
ABSTRACT: As a literary theory and critical method, deconstruction has undergone various
controversies since its initiation in the 1970s. The encounter between the humanists M. H. Abrams
and Wayne C. Booth and the deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller was especially remarkable due to
the unwavering position and solid argumentation on both sides of the debate. Scrutinizing both
critical pluralism of the former and deconstruction of meaning by the latter, this essay attempts to
analyze and evaluate the vision and method of deconstructive criticism.
Keywords: deconstructive criticism, humanism, pluralism, view of meaning
Author: Guo Wei < 10thmuse@163. com > is a PhD candidate at College of Humanities, Jilin
University, Changchun, China (130012) and a lecturer at College of Foreign Languages, Beihua
University, Jilin, China (132013). His research is focused on western literary theory.
Non-fiction:
A New Territory for Studies of Pre-18th Century Feminist Literature in English
ABSTRACT: Since 2000, feminist literary studies in both US and UK have witnessed a rising
interest in religious writings and life writings penned in English by pre-18th
century women
writers. In the meantime, more and more women’s writings are being excavated and recognized as
works of non-fiction, to the effect of both diversifying the genre and enriching feminist literature.
This article argues that the new attention to pre-18th century feminist nonfiction indicates that
women in medieval and early modern times in both Britain and other European countries took an
active part in social, political, literary and religious activities and made great achievements.
Keywords: pre-18th century, non-fiction, religious writing, life writing
Author: Pan Jian < [email protected] > is a professor at School of Foreign Studies and Institute
of English Language and Literature, Hunan University of Commerce, Changsha, China (410205),
specializing in British and American women’s literature.
What Is Poetics Today?
— A Review of LHT’s Special Issue The Adventure of Poetics
ABSTRACT: In 2012 the French online journal LHT published a special issue “The Adventure of
Poetics” to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the French journal Poétique. A number of
scholars, including Gérard Genette, contributed to this issue by reviewing the forty years of
evolution of French poetics, analyzing the conditions and problems of French and international
poetics and envisaging future development of this discipline. Based on this special issue and other
important works of poetics, this essay examines the particularities of contemporary French poetics,
discusses possible approaches for further research and points out the significance of such
researches.
Keywords: “The Adventure of Poetics”, Poétique, contemporary French poetics
Author: Cao Danhong < [email protected] > is an associate professor at School of Foreign
Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023). Her research interests include translation
studies and French literature.
“That the People Might Live”:
Native American Elegy Lost and Regained
ABSTRACT: As a genre expressing melancholy or sadness, elegies abound in Native American
literature ranging from early oral performances to contemporary writings. Rather than highlighting
the past and personal loss as mainstream literature does, Native American elegies embody the
mourning of collective melancholia, reflecting indigenous people’s unique vision of the world and
the sufferings they experienced. Another important message these elegies convey is that the people
might live on.
Keywords: “That the People Might Live”, elegy, communitism, continuance, Native American
Author: Yuan Xiaoming < [email protected] > is a PhD candidate at School of Foreign
Languages, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023). His major research field is
contemporary British and American literature.
A Review of A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism
ABSTRACT: Locating American ethnic literature between the competing ideas of culture in
anthropology and sociology, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism by Christopher Douglas
outlines the development of literary multiculturalism from culturalist literature to assimilationist
literature and cultural nationalist literature. This three-phase model sheds new light on the study of
American ethnic literature. With the achievement of multiculturalism affirmed, some of the
problems in the present form of multiculturalism are scrutinized when it blurs the boundary
between culture and race, succumbing to the racist logic of biological determinism. From an
interdisciplinary perspective, Douglas’s book innovatively integrates American ethnic literature
into a unified field and opens up space for new explorations.
Keywords: multiculturalism, ethnic American literature, culture, assimilationism, cultural
nationalism
Author: Zhao Wenshu <wszhao@ nju.edu.en > is professor of English at the School of Foreign
Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210093). He is currently working on multicultural
American literature.
