Books by Shuangyi Li
This book examines the works of four contemporary first-generation Chinese migrant writer-artists... more This book examines the works of four contemporary first-generation Chinese migrant writer-artists in France: François CHENG, GAO Xingjian, DAI Sijie, and SHAN Sa. They were all born in China, moved to France in their adulthood to pursue their literary and artistic ambitions, and have enjoyed the highest French and Western institutional recognitions, from the Grand Prix de la Francophonie to the Nobel Prize in Literature. They have established themselves not only as writers, but also as translators, calligraphers, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers mainly in their host country. French has become their dominant—but not only—language of literary creation (except for Gao); yet, linguistic idioms, poetic imagery, and classical thought from Chinese cultural heritage permeate their French texts and visual artworks, reflecting a strong translingual and transmedial sensibility. The book provides not only distinctive literary and artistic examples beyond existing studies of intercultural encounter, French postcolonial, and Chinese diasporic enquiries; more importantly, it formulates a theoretical model that captures the creative dynamics between the French/francophone and Chinese/sinophone spaces of articulation, thereby contributing to contemporary debates about literary and artistic production, interpretation, and circulation in the global development of comparative/world literature, as well as intermediality studies.
The book traces the literary journey that Proust’s work made to China and back by means of transl... more The book traces the literary journey that Proust’s work made to China and back by means of translation, intertextual engagement, and the creation of a transcultural dialogue through migrant literature. It begins with a translation history of Proust’s work in China and studies the different (re)translations and editions of La Recherche highlighting their culturally conditioned thematic emphases and negligence, such as time and memory over anti-Semitism and homosexuality. The book then moves on to explore three contemporary mainland Chinese writers’ creative intertextual engagement with Proust against the backdrop of China's explosive development from modernity to post-modernity in the 1990s. Finally, back to France, the book examines the multifarious literary relations between Proust and the Franco-Chinese migrant writer François Cheng. It demonstrates how the cultural heritages of China and the West can be re-negotiated and put into dialogue through the fictional and creative medium of literature, as well as providing a means of understanding the economic, political, and cultural exchanges in our current global context.
The three key areas of exploration — translation, intertext, translcultural dialogue — signal, at once, a strict and narrow focus on a particular form of literary relation between Proust and China in each chapter/part of the study, and an interrelated, and, in many ways, theoretically overlapping, approach to such a relation in the literary polysystem. Through the case of Proust, the project tries to demonstrate how the cultural heritages of China and the West can be re-negotiated, re-thought, and put into dialogue through the fictional and creative medium of literature. Crucial to my comparatist approach to Proust is to see the Chinese translations, literary appropriations, and translingual remaking of his work as a means of understanding the economic, political, and cultural exchange, tension, struggle, and evolution in our current global context.
Journal articles by Shuangyi Li
Modern Languages Open, 2024
English:
This article examines the novel L’acrobatie aérienne de Confucius (2009) by the
francop... more English:
This article examines the novel L’acrobatie aérienne de Confucius (2009) by the
francophone Chinese writer Dai Sijie, which is claimed to be based on sexual anecdotes about the historical Emperor Zhengde of the Ming dynasty. From the audacious novelistic theme to the heterogeneous narrative style and Rabelaisian carnivalesque humour, L’acrobatie represents Dai’s most experimental work to date. Yet its artistic and intellectual merits have been almost completely ignored by critics. This article demonstrates the transcultural textual performance in Dai’s exploration of sex and sexuality in both animals and humans, which also touches upon issues of race and species. Drawing on the theories of “sextuality” (Cristina Carrigós) and zoopoetics (Anne Simon), it aims to unveil Dai’s sophisticated weaving of a transcultural narrative and aesthetic while situating the genesis and diegesis of the novel in a “literary zoology” as well as an “ecology of world literature” (Alexander Beecroft), a literary environment marked by the dynamics of literary circulation, confluence and cross-fertilization.
Français:
Cet article se penche sur le roman L’acrobatie aérienne de Confucius (2009) de l’écrivain chinois francophone Dai Sijie, qui prétend s’inspirer d’une personnalité historique, l’empereur chinois Zhengde de la dynastie Ming, connu tant pour la négligence de ses devoirs souverains que pour son mode de vie grotesque, débauché et décadent. Le règne de Zhengde (1505–21) fut marqué par les premiers contacts européens formels avec la Chine, initiés par les Portugais. Avec un thème audacieux de la sexualité transgressive et un style de narration polyphonique et éclatante, imprégné d’humour carnavalesque rabelaisien, le roman représente, jusqu’alors, l’œuvre la plus expérimentale écrite par l’écrivain. Pourtant, il récolte très peu de succès chez les critiques. Dans cet article, je dissèquerai la performance textuelle transculturelle du roman autour de la sexualité, qui se lie également aux questions de race et d’espèce. Puisant des théories de la « sextualité » (Cristina Carrigós) et de la zoopoétique (Anne Simon), je chercherai à déceler le tissage sophistiqué du texte transculturel et réencadrer la genèse et la diégèse du roman dans une « zoologie littéraire » aussi bien qu’une « ecology of world literature » (Alexander Beecroft), c’est-à-dire, un environnement littéraire marqué par les dynamiques de la circulation, la confluence et l’hybridation littéraires.
Bulletin d'Informations Proustiennes, 2023
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 2020
Reading comparatively and crossculturally can dramatically change our perception of each compared... more Reading comparatively and crossculturally can dramatically change our perception of each compared text, sometimes in utterly unexpected ways, giving us an enhanced understanding of the resistance, interference, manipulation, and transformation that intrinsically characterize world literary relations. Doing Comparative Literature is, therefore, much more than gathering a set of literary texts delimited by particular nationhood or languages; rather, it signals many ways of dealing with textual relations transnationally and across communities, histories, and languages, and, increasingly, of putting word in relation with other artistic or media forms.... attention to the physical qualities of sound, its mechanics of transmission, sound-inspired metaphors, and the processes of listening
and hearing, can help us rethink and revitalize what we mean by reading and reading literature comparatively.
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2019
This article examines the novel and film Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise, by the Franco-Ch... more This article examines the novel and film Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise, by the Franco-Chinese writer and filmmaker Dai Sijie, the story of which takes place against the background of the Cultural Revolution. The first part of my analysis will make clear how the film illuminates and dramatizes the special texture, aesthetic and structure of the novel, highlighting the cinematic sensibility of Dai's literary aesthetic. I then move on to investigate the linguistic aspects of the various translations between the novel and the film in French, Mandarin Chinese and Sichuanese. The aesthetic effects of dub-bing, in particular, will allow me to investigate new possibilities of reading exophone literature. Finally, this paper highlights the central role of oral sto-rytelling in the Chinese tradition in/through various forms of translation: interlingual as well as intermedial. In so doing, this article aims to add nuance to and enrich current debates on issues such as intercultural misreading and exoticism in Dai's works.
Essays in French Literature and Culture , 2018
The Franco-Chinese migrant woman writer Shan Sa left Beijing for Paris in 1990 at the age of seve... more The Franco-Chinese migrant woman writer Shan Sa left Beijing for Paris in 1990 at the age of seventeen. After her settlement in France, French soon became her additional, increasingly dominant language of literary creation. This article examines Shan’s three French- language novels that explicitly engage with Chinese historical and transhistorical narratives: Les Quatre Vies du saule (1999), La Cithare nue (2010), and Impératrice (2003). The former two were adaptively (self-)translated into Chinese and diegetically re-organized, truncated, and expanded in their Chinese versions. The latter rewriting of the intriguing legend of Empress Wu during the Tang dynasty showcases the incorporation of Chinese calligraphic aesthetic into the French novelistic fabric in Shan’s transcultural writing. Drawing on Steven Kellman’s “translingual imagination”, this article argues that the translingualism inherent in Shan’s (re-)creative process manifests itself as an autoexotic literary aesthetic and a continuous source of fabulation, opening up possibilities of narrative alterity.
Translation Studies, 2019
The sexological aspects of Proust’s work have largely been neglected in its Chinese reception. Th... more The sexological aspects of Proust’s work have largely been neglected in its Chinese reception. This article focuses on Chinese (re)translations of Proust’s sexual discourses in À la recherche du temps perdu and expounds the epistemic challenges of and the evolving strategies for translating sadomasochism and homosexuality into Chinese. It further explores how these observations refract the changing and largely de-pathologizing discourses on, and social attitudes to, sadomasochism and homosexuality in China from the late 1980s until now. A close examination of exemplary passages (from Du côté de chez Swann, Sodome et Gomorrhe, La Prisonnière, and Le Temps retrouvé) in different Chinese translations reveals a lexical and conceptual appropriation and recontextualization of modern Western as well as traditional Chinese discourses on/of sexology.
This article examines the two French-language novels by the Franco-Chinese migrant writer Françoi... more This article examines the two French-language novels by the Franco-Chinese migrant writer François Cheng, Le Dit de Tianyi (1998) and L' Eternité n'est pas de trop (2002), and proposes to conceptualize them as two novelistic models of cultural translation. Cheng's engagement with, and departure from, canonical Western novelistic models such as Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in Le Dit reveals his 'comparatist' ambition to reorient Western cultural heritage by putting it into dialogue with that of the East. L' Eternité, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with a translingual rewriting of Chinese literary traditions such as that of classical romance. While the first model applies principles of analogy, the second reflects a more traditional conception of translation that emphasizes faithfulness and authenticity. The two models are mutually complementary rather than exclusive. The study pays special attention to Cheng's 'Chinese-inked' French language and style, highlighting the aesthetic innovations and challenges in Cheng's transcul-tural writings.
Comparative Critical Studies 11.2-3 (2014), 295-314, Oct 2014
This paper explores how the ways in which Proust’s work have been historically received in China ... more This paper explores how the ways in which Proust’s work have been historically received in China – both in terms of its Chinese translations and three contemporary Chinese writers’ intertextual engagements with Proust’s work in translation – refract not only the internal ideological tensions and transformations of modern China, but also the exponential cultural exchange between China and France and the West at large.
Book Chapters by Shuangyi Li
Multilingual Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic), 2021
This chapter examines the aesthetic of the sinograph (or Chinese characters) in the French-langua... more This chapter examines the aesthetic of the sinograph (or Chinese characters) in the French-language novels, calligraphic works, and picture books by two first-generation Chinese migrant writers and artists in France, François Cheng and Shan Sa. It will begin with an illustration of Cheng's and Shan's 'Chinese' calligraphic works (accompanied by the artists' French texts and published in France) (Et le Soufflé devient signe: Portrait d’une âme à l’encre de Chine [2001] & Le Mirroir d’un calligraphe [2002]), and explicate their artistic sensibilities and visions informed by traditional Chinese aesthetic concepts, e.g. yin-yang, mountain-water, sentiment-scenery. It will then 'read' these calligraphic images into their respective French novelistic fabric (Le Dit de Tianyi [1998] & L’Impératrice [2003]) and demonstrate how our knowledge of the sinograph is key to the revelation of these writers' transcultural stylistic innovations and diegetic configurations, a kind of (in)visible multilingualism and multimodality beyond the obvious linguistic translation and lexical borrowing. Franco-Chinese writers and artists have a rather complex and sometimes paradoxical attitudes and relations to the Chinese script, especially facing a primarily francophone audience. Yet, I will argue that this conscious visual poeticization of/through the sinograph in the French language is still a defining aesthetic of Franco-Chinese literature and visual arts. To further problematize the notion of 'Chineseness'—seemingly essentialized by the sinograph in diasporic Chinese literature and visual arts—I will also draw a few conceptual parallels between these Franco-Chinese works and the visual (calligraphic) works by the American-Chinese artist Xu Bing, especially in relation to his Square World Calligraphy and Landscript series. I will draw on the theories of ‘imagetext’ (Mitchell 1994) and ‘the translational’ (Tong King Lee 2013) to investigate the multilingual and multimodal aspects of cultural translation in the critical framework of World Literature.
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures (Bloomsbury Academic), 2022
This chapter approaches the notion of the vernacular from the perspective of French exophone lite... more This chapter approaches the notion of the vernacular from the perspective of French exophone literature written by a group of first-generation Chinese migrant writers in France, such as François Cheng, Dai Sijie, and Shan Sa. While such literary works may be said to embody a displaced articulation of cosmopolitanism through diasporic mobility, they also diegetically engage with the historical development of the vernacular in the Chinese and transnational contexts. The vernacular is thus explored as a novelistic theme, a variety of literary genres, and a linguistic or translingual sensibility. This chapter first historically contextualizes the different vernaculars and vernacular literatures in China, signaling, in particular, the problem of translation and applicability of the term “vernacular” in the Chinese context. It then moves on to explore how the different notions of the vernacular feature in the Franco-Chinese writers’ works and how such notions are also fictionally reconfigured via French and creatively adapted for an international, predominantly francophone and Western readership. In so doing, the chapter highlights the creative tension between literary exoticism and vernacular imagination.
Sounds Senses (Liverpool University Press), 2021
Francophone Chinese writers Dai Sijie and François Cheng are both first-generation migrants in Fr... more Francophone Chinese writers Dai Sijie and François Cheng are both first-generation migrants in France, whose French-language literary works have received the highest French institutional recognitions (from the Prix Femina to the Grand Prix de la francophonie de l'Académie française). Existing scholarship on the impact of their native Chinese language on these writers' French texts focuses almost exclusively on the visual aspects. Different from such oculocentric approaches, this chapter conceptualizes Franco-Chinese literature as exophone ("exotic sounding") writing and scrutinizes the auditory aesthetic in the two writers' different literary engagements with sound and voice. With access to both the sound and the image of Chinese and French, Dai and Cheng are seen not only to play with Western fantasy, but also to rework and reconfigure, cross-culturally, the dynamic relationship between phone and graph in their literary works, especially in relation to exoticism. Indeed, it is ultimately through sound and voice that both writers attempt to think beyond Chinese-French binary tensions and reflect more synthetically on literary and human experiences of language that are universal and at the same highly individual.
Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction (Stockholm University Press), 2021
The Franco-Chinese migrant writer François Cheng is the first French Academician of Asian origin.... more The Franco-Chinese migrant writer François Cheng is the first French Academician of Asian origin. His French-language novel Le Dit de Tianyi (Prix Femina 1998) (trans. as The River Below in English) recounts the protagonist’s life trajectory across the turbulent twentieth century, from wartime China to France and back to a radically changed Communist China. This paper will highlight the dynamic relationship between travel and translation fictionally "staged" by the novel. Drawing on theories of cultural translation (Homi Bhabha) and translingualism (Steven Kellman), the paper will demonstrate how travel motifs ultimately create a liminal, translingual space where both European and Chinese literary and artistic traditions are set in motion towards a planetary possibility of cultural transcendence.
Book Reviews by Shuangyi Li
Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 12.1 (Spring/Summer 2021), 2021
Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 2021
Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility
by Jieun Kiaer, Jenn... more Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility
by Jieun Kiaer, Jennifer Guest, and Xiaofan Amy Li, London, Routledge, 2019, vii + 120 pp., GBP £44.99, (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-8153-5827-5
French Studies, 2019
Francophonie en Orient: aux croisements France-Asie (1840-1940). Par MATHILDE KANG. (Languages an... more Francophonie en Orient: aux croisements France-Asie (1840-1940). Par MATHILDE KANG. (Languages and Culture in History.) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 221 pp.
Modern Language Review Vol. 109, No. 2, April 2014, Apr 2014
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Books by Shuangyi Li
The three key areas of exploration — translation, intertext, translcultural dialogue — signal, at once, a strict and narrow focus on a particular form of literary relation between Proust and China in each chapter/part of the study, and an interrelated, and, in many ways, theoretically overlapping, approach to such a relation in the literary polysystem. Through the case of Proust, the project tries to demonstrate how the cultural heritages of China and the West can be re-negotiated, re-thought, and put into dialogue through the fictional and creative medium of literature. Crucial to my comparatist approach to Proust is to see the Chinese translations, literary appropriations, and translingual remaking of his work as a means of understanding the economic, political, and cultural exchange, tension, struggle, and evolution in our current global context.
Journal articles by Shuangyi Li
This article examines the novel L’acrobatie aérienne de Confucius (2009) by the
francophone Chinese writer Dai Sijie, which is claimed to be based on sexual anecdotes about the historical Emperor Zhengde of the Ming dynasty. From the audacious novelistic theme to the heterogeneous narrative style and Rabelaisian carnivalesque humour, L’acrobatie represents Dai’s most experimental work to date. Yet its artistic and intellectual merits have been almost completely ignored by critics. This article demonstrates the transcultural textual performance in Dai’s exploration of sex and sexuality in both animals and humans, which also touches upon issues of race and species. Drawing on the theories of “sextuality” (Cristina Carrigós) and zoopoetics (Anne Simon), it aims to unveil Dai’s sophisticated weaving of a transcultural narrative and aesthetic while situating the genesis and diegesis of the novel in a “literary zoology” as well as an “ecology of world literature” (Alexander Beecroft), a literary environment marked by the dynamics of literary circulation, confluence and cross-fertilization.
Français:
Cet article se penche sur le roman L’acrobatie aérienne de Confucius (2009) de l’écrivain chinois francophone Dai Sijie, qui prétend s’inspirer d’une personnalité historique, l’empereur chinois Zhengde de la dynastie Ming, connu tant pour la négligence de ses devoirs souverains que pour son mode de vie grotesque, débauché et décadent. Le règne de Zhengde (1505–21) fut marqué par les premiers contacts européens formels avec la Chine, initiés par les Portugais. Avec un thème audacieux de la sexualité transgressive et un style de narration polyphonique et éclatante, imprégné d’humour carnavalesque rabelaisien, le roman représente, jusqu’alors, l’œuvre la plus expérimentale écrite par l’écrivain. Pourtant, il récolte très peu de succès chez les critiques. Dans cet article, je dissèquerai la performance textuelle transculturelle du roman autour de la sexualité, qui se lie également aux questions de race et d’espèce. Puisant des théories de la « sextualité » (Cristina Carrigós) et de la zoopoétique (Anne Simon), je chercherai à déceler le tissage sophistiqué du texte transculturel et réencadrer la genèse et la diégèse du roman dans une « zoologie littéraire » aussi bien qu’une « ecology of world literature » (Alexander Beecroft), c’est-à-dire, un environnement littéraire marqué par les dynamiques de la circulation, la confluence et l’hybridation littéraires.
and hearing, can help us rethink and revitalize what we mean by reading and reading literature comparatively.
Book Chapters by Shuangyi Li
Book Reviews by Shuangyi Li
by Jieun Kiaer, Jennifer Guest, and Xiaofan Amy Li, London, Routledge, 2019, vii + 120 pp., GBP £44.99, (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-8153-5827-5