Abstract
Goethe’s theory of world literature has spurred Chinese literature’s desire to join the world in the last 100 years. From Zheng Zhenduo’s “unification of literature” in the early twentieth century to “stepping into world literature” in the 1980s, the “global elements of twentieth century Chinese literature” at the turn of the twenty-first century and finally the “communication of Chinese literature overseas” of recent years, it has been a constant feature of Chinese literature’s global trajectory. This desire implies a conception of the relationship between Chinese literature and world literature that has experienced a number of transitions, from idealism to realism, from cosmopolitanism to localism, from import to export, yet “becoming world literature” has remained a constant pursuit.
This essay was translated by David Z. Dayton, who is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis.
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Notes
- 1.
David Damrosch, Liu Hongtao, Yin Xing, Theories of World Literature: A Reader. Peking University Press, 2013, pp. 3–5.
- 2.
David Damrosch, Liu Hongtao, Yin Xing, ibidem, pp. 66–76.
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Liu Hongtao, “Two Practices of the Concept of World Literature in China in 1950s–60s”, in: Comparative Literature in China, No. 3, 2010.
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Zeng Xiaoyi , Stepping into the World Literature: China’s Modern Writers and Foreign Literature. Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1985, pp. 1–40.
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Chen Sihe, “The Global Elements of Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature: Editor’s Note”, in: Comparative Literature in China 38.1 (2000), pp. 31–32.
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Chen Sihe, ibidem, p. 31.
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Chen Sihe, ibidem, p. 31.
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Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters. Transl. M.B. De Bevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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Stephen Owens, “The Anxiety of Global Influence: What is World Poetry?”, in: The New Republic, November 19 (1990), pp. 28–32.
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Andrew Jones, “Chinese Literature in the ‘World’ Literary Economy”, in: Modern Chinese Literature 8.1–2 (1994), pp. 171–190.
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See Zhang Yingjin, “Cultural Translation between the World and the Chinese: The Problematics in Positioning Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian”, in: Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31.2 (July 2005), pp. 140.
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David Damrosch. What is World Literature? Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 281.
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Karen Laura Thornber, “Rethinking the World in World Literature: East Asia and Literary Contact Nebulae”, in: World Literature in Theory. Ed. David Damrosch. London: Wiley, 2014, pp. 460–79.
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Shu-mei Shih . Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, p. 4.
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Tan Eng-Chaw , ed. Selected Works of ASEAN Modern Chinese Literature. Singapore: The Youth Book Co., 2013.
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Liu Hongtao (2018). How to Become World Literature: Chinese Literature’s Aspiration and Way to “Step into the World”. In: Fang, W. (eds) Tensions in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0635-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0635-8_14
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