Karen Thornber

Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature

Conventions Introduction: Empire, Transculturation, and Literary Contact Nebulae 1. Travel, Readerly Contact, and Writerly Contact in the Japanese Empire Part I: Interpretive and Interlingual Transculturation 2. Transcultural Literary Criticism in the Japanese Empire 3. Multiple Vectors and Early Interlingual Transculturations of Japanese Literature 4. From Cultural Innovation to Total War Part II: Intertextual Transculturation 5. Intertextuality, Empire, and East Asia 6. Spotlight on Suffering 7. Reconceptualizing Relationships: Individuals, Families, Nations 8. Questions of Agency: Raising Responsibility, Parodying Persistence, and Rethinking Reform Epilogue: Postwar Intra-East Asian Dialogues and the Future of Negotiating Transculturally Notes Works Cited Index

Mashal Books as Cultural Mediator: Translating East Asian, Middle Eastern, and African Literatures into Urdu in Lahore

Thornber discusses Pakistani publisher Mashal Books as a cultural mediator among Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. After opening with a brief introduction to Mashal, its history, variety of publications, and commitment to translating creative writing into Urdu, the chapter analyzes Mashal’s Fiction list, arguing that its translations renegotiate multiple hierarchies among nations, communities, and genders. Looking closely at the types of texts Mashal has chosen to translate, and at how selected texts have been marketed as well as translated, provides new perspectives on processes of transfer, the overlap of actor roles, and the transgression of cultural fields. The chapter offers fresh insights into how literary exchanges have renegotiated hierarchies among disparate communities globally.

The Many Scripts of the Chinese Scriptworld, the Epic of King Gesar , and World Literature

The idea of an East Asian cultural “bloc” united in no small part by the Chinese script has long been widely held; through the end of the Qing dynasty Chinese characters served as the scripta franca for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese intellectuals. Yet writing in East Asia has almost always involved more than Chinese characters and their offshoots. The purpose of this article is twofold. First is to introduce readers of world literature unfamiliar with East Asia to the wide variety of the region’s languages and scripts. The second objective is to demonstrate that when we associate writing in China only with Chinese characters, as often has been the case, we overlook some of the region’s, and the world’s, most significant works of world literature. These include the twelfth-century Epic of King Gesar , a living epic which at twenty-five times the size of the Iliad is the world’s longest.

Why (Not) World Literature

Increasing attention to the enduring processes of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and transnationalism, together with growing frustration with the geographic, linguistic, and conceptual limitations of many fields of literature, has led in the past two decades to burgeoning interest in the discipline of world literature. Institutes, conferences, articles, volumes, and journals on various aspects of world literature are proliferating around the world as never before. But the challenges facing world literature remain significant. One of the largest is the field’s continuing biases, and in particular its tendency—despite its name—to privilege literature that not only has been embraced by Western readers but also conforms to the expectations of Western scholars. Just as important is the failure of world literature to integrate the study of literature more comprehensively with urgent matters of global significance. The pages below elaborate on the first challenge and address the second, identifying several opportunities going forward.

Afterword: Ecocritical and Literary Futures

Human cultural products have negotiated—revealed, reinterpreted, and shaped—ecological changes since prehistoric times. Paleolithic cave paintings dating to well before 30,000 BCE give diverse perspectives on early human practices that altered environments. Human language has played an even more significant role in transforming and transformed ecosystems. It has been used to command, describe, justify, celebrate, condemn, encourage amelioration of, and both divert attention from and call attention to human treatment of environments. For thousands of years oral and written texts from around the world have probed not only how people are affected by their surroundings but also how and why they alter environments near and far. References in literature to constructing, inhabiting, and dismantling built environments as well as to hunting, agriculture, and eating all give insight into changed landscapes. Even creative texts that do not include human characters often at least mention human-induced transformation of environments. For its part, world literature—understood broadly as creative texts that have circulated beyond their culture(s) of origin— has since The Epic of Gilgamesh (second millennium BCE) depicted people as radically changing their surroundings.

French Discourse in Chinese, in Chinese Discourse in French–Paradoxes of Chinese Francophone Émigré Writing

One of the most promising new areas of Francophone studies is literature in French by writers from countries not part of France’s former colonial empire. France held concessions in Shanghai and other Chinese cities from 1849 to 1943, but it exerted less control over China than over its colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Chinese engagement with France and its literature thus has not been as politically charged as that of France’s former colonies. Yet the interactions have been no less passionate and ambiguous, particularly among Chinese writers who have emigrated to France. This article analyzes depictions of Chinese reconfigurations of French literature in two prominent Chinese Francophone émigré novels: Académie française member François Cheng’s (Cheng Baoyi’s) Le dit de Tianyi (The Saying of Tianyi, 1998), which won the 1998 Prix Femina, and Dai Sijie’s bestselling Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 2000), which has been translated into nearly thirty languages and adapted into a film, co-written and directed by Dai Sijie himself (2002). Establishing Chinese as consuming, reconfiguring (adapting/translating), and writing French-language literature, Balzac and Tianyi destabilize divisions among national literatures and cultures. They do so both by their mere existence and also, paradoxically, by their attention to translation, which is necessitated by divisions among (national) languages. The many reconfigurations of Balzac and Tianyi, particularly their Chinese translations and the film adaptation of Balzac, continue this process.