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CONTEMPORARY FOREIGN LITERATURE
Vol. 35, No. 3 (Autumn 2014)
ABSTRACTS
A “Web” of Terror?
—— Thomas Pynchon’s 9/11 Narrative in Bleeding Edge
ABSTRACT: Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s first 9/11 novel, is unique because of its
comprehensive use of World Wide Web both as backdrop and as a metaphor. On one
level, the novel is an imaginative text that provides an alternative 9/11 narrative about
international terrorism and conspiracy. On a deeper level, however, what lies behind
the story is a critique of the network society and media entangled with late capitalism.
For Pynchon, 9/11 may not be an inconceivable historical event; rather, 9/11 was
spawned by a convergence of the Internet boom, global capitalism, and
post-humanism. The novel suggests that how we reflect upon the post-9/11
technopolitics of the Information Age will largely decide the future conditions of
human beings in virtual reality.
Keywords: Pynchon, 9/11 narrative, Internet, post-humanism
Author: Dan Hansong <[email protected]> is an associate professor at School of
Foreign Languages, Nanjing University, Jiangsu, China (210093). His major research
area is modern and contemporary American fiction.
Interpreting the Holy Grail Motif in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
ABSTRACT: In his post-9/11 fiction The Road, Cormac McCarthy transforms the
Holy Grail legend into a mystery story to explore the meaning of life. The father in
this novel evokes the image of the injured Fisher King, revealing that the post
apocalyptic wasteland is caused by the loss of the Holy Grail. The father and other
characters, transformed into King Arthur’s knights, each seek their own particular
Grail but all end up in failure, yet the boy as the real Holy Grail becomes light to lead
human beings out of the wasteland. McCarthy rewrites the Holy Grail legend by
setting it in a post-apocalyptic landscape, thereby investigating the nature and
meaning of post-9/11 human society.
Keywords: Cormac McCarthy, The Road, the Holy Grail motif, interpretation
Author: Wang Weiqian <[email protected]> is a professor of English at Jiangsu
University of Technology, Changzhou, China (213001). She specializes in English
teaching and American literature.
Remembering and Bearing:
On the Spiritual Ecology in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
ABSTRACT: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) has been called “the definitive work
of 9/11 novels” for its vivid portrayal of real-life and its significant thematic concerns.
Focusing on the novel’s representation of the relations between humanity, homeland
and memory, this article takes an ecocritical approach to analyze the novel’s
revelation of human spiritual ecology.
Keywords: Don Dellilo, Falling Man, remembering, spiritual ecology
Author: Liang Xun <[email protected]> is an associate professor at Shenzhen
University, Shenzhen, China (518052). Her research interests include comparative
literature and American literature.
Reading Consumer Culture in Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice
ABSTRACT: Fairy-tale rewriting has flourished in the era of postmodern
consumerism. Though inspired by the classics, contemporary writers often question
the formulaic structure of classical fairy tales and reinterpret their conventional
themes to reveal hidden ideology and value systems. This article takes Robert
Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice as an example to study fairy-tale rewriting in the
context of consumer culture, focusing on issues such as consumer culture’s
ideological control over the consuming public, the reduction of contemporary art and
culture into entertainment, and the pseudo-liberation of human nature.
Keywords: Pinocchio in Venice, consumerism, ideological control, panentertainment,
pseudo-liberation
Author: Hui Chunping <[email protected]> is a lecturer at School of Foreign
Languages, Nankai University, Tianjin, China (300071), specializing in British and
American literature and Western literary theory.
Reading Humanist Concerns for
Social Ecology in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
ABSTRACT: Social ecology traces the essential roots of ecological crisis to
multifarious social ills. As a vital part of the natural ecosystem, human community is
greatly influenced by natural laws in its social structure and mode of social life. It is
therefore important to remodel social ecology and redress the problematic
relationships between human and nature. In her novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker
expresses a humanist concern for social ecology by exposing the severe sufferings
that racial discrimination, sexual oppression and religious deception have brought to
American society. Suggesting reconciliation between the blacks and the whites,
equality between male and female, and freedom of belief, the novel argues for an
ethic of complementarity with which to restructure human community towards an
ecological society.
Keywords: Alice Walker, The Color Purple, ecological society
Author: Du Yeyan <[email protected]> is an associate professor of English at
School of International Exchange, Huaihai Institute of Technology, Lianyungang,
China (222005). Her major academic interests are British and American women
writings, and African-American literature.
Against Radical Innocence:
August: Osage County as a Parody of Long Day’s Journey into Night
ABSTRACT: Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County was an
enormous popular success upon its premiere in 2007. A major reason for its
surprisingly enthusiastic reception lies in its parody of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s
Journey into Night. This paper argues that Letts’s play functions as an act of rewriting
that seeks to liberate the American audience from a complacent obsession with radical
innocence.
Keywords: August: Osage County, Tracy Letts, Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey
into Night
Author: Liang Chaoqun <[email protected]> is an associate professor at
Foreign Language School of East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
(200062). His major academic interests include British and American drama, literary
theory and translation studies.
Approaching Memory and Trauma in Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves
ABSTRACT: In her 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, Native American novelist
Louise Erdrich reflects upon the past, present and future of Native Americans. The
novel depicts the painful history and psychological trauma experienced by Native
Americans as well as mixed-blood tribes, but it also looks into the psychological
entanglement of white Americans. Developing Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of
cultural trauma, this essay examines the novel’s representation of the historical
trajectory of collective trauma and its impact on various Native-American and
mixed-blood tribes to illustrate Erdrich’s unique contributions to Native American
literature.
Keywords: The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich, cultural trauma
Author: Yang Heng <[email protected]> is a lecturer at School of Foreign
Studies of Minzu University of China, Beijing, China (100081). Her research interest
is American literature, focusing on Native American literature in recent years.
Gender Politics and Narrative Tactics in Gunga Ding Highway
ABSTRACT: In the context of a putatively contemporary post-racial culture, racism
is often represented through gender metaphors. Frank Chin’s last novel Gunga Ding
Highway explores Asian American men’s gender anxiety and their struggles under
unfavorable racial and cultural circumstances. Moreover, Chin resorts to gender
politics as a literary act of revolt by inventing Chinese American male characters who,
emerging from absence to presence, function as active narrators in a masculine
cultural space. Drawing upon narrative theories, this paper locates Gunga Ding
Highway in its historical context to examine Asian American masculinities favored by
Chin and his gender politics, thereby analyzing the interplay between his political
motivation, his narrative strategies and the reader’s response.
Keywords: Gunga Ding Highway, Chinese American masculinity, rhetoric narrative,
gender politics
Author: Dong Xiaoye <[email protected]> is an associate professor of
English at Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, China (150040). Her recent research
is mainly focused on Asian American fiction and narratology.
Death of the Angel: A Feminist Reading of A. S. Byatt’s Still Life
ABSTRACT: Centered on the protagonist Stephanie Potter’s death in A. S. Byatt’s
novel Still Life, this paper explores the author’s reflection upon intellectual women’s
existential situation in the 1950s Britain. It argues that Stephanie, despite her
self-consciousness and vision of an ideal life, conforms to traditional female roles in
the prevailing “women-back-home” trend and therefore suffers bitterly from loss of
self and disillusionment with life. Her “accidental” premature death not only
symbolizes oppression of women at the level of gender ideology, but also dramatizes
Byatt’s criticism of some women’s personal flaws that partly explain their tragic lives
deprived of power to resolve the conflict between traditional roles and modern self
during social transformation.
Keywords: A. S. Byatt, Still Life, death plot, gender ideology, Britain in the 1950s
Author: Chen Shubo <[email protected]> is an associate professor at School of
Foreign Languages of Capital Normal University, Beijing, China (100083),
specializing in British and American literature.
Reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday as an Urban Gothic Novel
ABSTRACT: Saturday, Ian McEwan’s first fictionalization of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks and the Iraq War, occupies an important place in his canon. While Chinese
scholars pay little attention to its significance for McEwan, scholars abroad have
approached the novel from a variety of perspectives such as ethics, narratology and
psychology. This paper reads Saturday as an Urban-Gothic novel to examine how
McEwan, by tapping into the political potential of this genre, expresses his thoughts
on current international affairs and contemporary British society.
Keywords: Ian McEwan，Saturday，genre，urban gothic
Author: Geng Xiao <geng-xiao@126．com> is a lecturer at School of Foreign
Languages, South-Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan, China (430074). Her
research focuses on British and American literature．
Rewriting the Female Romance:
On the Postmodern Narrative Strategies in Fingersmith
ABSTRACT: As the last novel of British writer Sarah Waters’s Victorian trilogy,
Fingersmith explores Victorian women’s love and desire from the postmodern
perspective by retelling a love story of the marginalized in the 19th-century England.
Juxtaposing multiple points of view, weaving a variety of symbols and metaphors, and
playing with conventional forms of fiction such as detective story, Victorian
sentimental novel, gothic novel and moral allegory, Waters constructs an elaborate
narrative, featuring intertextual references to canonical works, to speak her
postmodern mind regarding female desire and literary recreation.
Keywords: Sarah Waters, Fingersmith, narrative strategy, postmodern mind
Author: Yao Zhen <[email protected]> is a Ph.D. candidate at School of
Foreign Studies, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China (210097), specializing in
the 20th-century British and American literature.
A Discourse of Space-Time Narrative in Sexing the Cherry
ABSTRACT: In light of the internal contradiction of space-time concepts in physics,
British postmodern novelist Jeanette Winterson establishes a discourse of space-time
narrative in her novel Sexing the Cherry to establish a set of narrative guidelines for
historiographic narrative and identity narrative, the two major thematic narratives in
the novel. Here historiographic narrative acknowledges the objectivity of historical
events while underlining historiographical subjectivity and multiplicity; it follows
principles such as irreversibility of time, openness of historical space, and
determinacy of space. Identity narrative, on the other hand, explores the formation of
role play and gender identity, both changing with time and space. Both thematic
narratives in this work therefore feature coexistence of reversible and irreversible time,
as well as determinate and indeterminate space. Winterson’s discourse of space-time
narrative, evidenced by these thematic narratives, suggests that contradiction and
paradox, everlasting as they are, can be harmonized in art, whose eternity herein
implicitly reflects this postmodern novel’s modernist pursuit.
Keywords: Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, paradoxical discourse of
space-time narrative, historiographic narrative, identity narrative
Authors: Yang Li <[email protected]> is a lecturer of English at School of
Foreign Languages and Literature, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing, China
(401331). Her major research area is contemporary British and American literature.
Luo Wenlin <[email protected]> is an associate professor of English at
School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Chongqing Normal University,
Chongqing, China (401331). Her major research area is contemporary British and
American literature.
On the Narrative Structure of One Person’s Weather
ABSTRACT: Aoyama Nanae, a female writer in contemporary Japan, displays
considerable imagination in her literary works. Her prize-winning novel, One
Person’s Weather, presents a nuanced realistic portrayal of life in Japan via close
observation. By devising a unique point of view and innovative narrative time and
space, Nanae reveals contemporary Japanese women’s attitudes towards reality and
provokes readers to reflect on their own lives.
Keywords: Aoyama Nanae, One Person’s Weather, narrative structure
Author: Ye Lin <[email protected]> is a professor of Japanese at School of Foreign
Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023). Her major research interests
are Japanese literature and literary theory.
A Study of Virtue Ethics in John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent
ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck’s
last novel, from the perspective of humanistic ethics as advocated by American
psychologist Erich Fromm. Affected by corrupt social values, the protagonist Ethan
fails to realize his primary potentiality for goodness at first. Touched by his untainted
daughter Alan, however, Ethan eventually experiences an epiphany, gradually
recognizes the importance of self-love, and overcomes alienation in his realization of
active freedom. By tracking Ethan’s moral development, Steinbeck gives voice to his
own ethical concerns.
Keywords: John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent, virtue ethics, primary
potentiality, second potentiality
Author: Zheng Li <[email protected]> is an associate professor at School of
Foreign Languages, Beihang University, Beijing, China (100191). Her major
academic interest is British and American literature.
Spatial Autobiographical Narrative and Autobiographical Narrative Space
ABSTRACT: The essay studies the spatial forms and spatiality of autobiography
from two aspects. On the one hand, it scrutinizes subgenres of spatial autobiography,
such as autotravography, autotopography, ecoautobiography, flaneur narrative and
diasporic autobiography, paying specific attention to their representation of space,
geography and locus. On the other hand, it examines autobiographical spatiality to
discuss how autobiography becomes the juxtapositional realm of reality and fiction as
well as the representational space of multiple identities and narrative strategies.
Finally, it studies diasporic autobiography as a typical postmodern narrative of spatial
autobiography that emphatically represents spatiality.
Keywords: spatial autobiographical narrative, autobiographical narrative space,
postmodernity
Author: Yang Xiaolin <[email protected]> is a Ph.D. candidate in world
literature and comparative literature at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China (510632)
and an associate professor at School of Foreign Studies, Southern Medical University,
Guangzhou, China (510515). She is currently engaged in the study of English
literature and narratology.
Chick Lit and Postfeminism
ABSTRACT: Chick Lit as a new genre of women’s literature became popular in the
late 1990s, defined by critics as a type of postfeminist fiction. The present paper
closely reads popular Chick Lit works such as Sex and the City, Bridget Jones’ Diary,
The Devil Wears Prada and the Shopaholic series to analyze their feminist heritage
and their postfeminist revision of previous feminist discourses. Authored and read by
people sharing more postfeminist traits along the continuum from feminism to
postfeminism, Chick Lit has shown its inheritance, challenge and revision of early
feminist discourses through their thematic concerns over individual improvement,
gender relations and consumer ethics.
Keywords: Chick Lit, feminism, postfeminism
Author: Zhang Ying <[email protected]> is a lecturer at School of Foreign Studies,
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China (210023), specializing in British and American
fiction and Renaissance drama.
A Critical Survey of Chinese Perspectives on Doris Lessing’s Novels
ABSTRACT: This essay offers a critical survey of Chinese perspectives on Doris
Lessing’s novels from 1981 to 2010. The thirty years’ Lessing studies in China fell
into two periods: before 1992, the publications were mostly introductory; after 1992,
specific issues became major concerns. Approaching Lessing from different
theoretical perspectives such as feminism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism and
cultural studies, Chinese scholars mainly focus on the form of Lessing’s artistic
creation, her feminist attitude, her philosophy of life and epistemological views, her
colonial position and the issue of space. These studies have contributed much to
understanding Lessing in China. However, rapid increase in the number of research
publications, especially from the 1990s forward, has brought about certain
inadequacies. Much remains to be done for Chinese scholars to explore Lessing in
depth.
Keywords: Doris Lessing, study of novels, critical survey, Chinese perspectives
Author: Jiang Hong <[email protected]> is a research professor at the Foreign
Literature Research Institute, and the associate editor of Foreign Literature, Beijing
Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China (100089).
Two Trends in Chinese Scholarship on Australian Literature since 2000
ABSTRACT: Since 2000, Chinese scholarship on Australian literature has shown
two apparent trends. One is analyzing the thematic concerns and aesthetic values of
Australian literary works, novels in particular, with multicultural theories in the
postcolonial context. The other is mapping out concepts and paradigms of Australian
literary criticism to explore their theoretical significance to literary creation. The
recent findings that Chinese scholars have made in both practical and theoretical
criticism of Australian literature exemplify Chinese scholars’ perspectives on
Australian literature.
Keywords: Australian literature, multicultural theory, literary criticism
Author: Peng Qinglong <[email protected]> is a professor at Shanghai
Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China (200240), specializing in Australian literary
studies.
