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No full textThe notion of "ethnic minority literature" is well established in Chinese literary studies. According to the standard definition, ethnic minority literature must be authored by a member of an ethnic minority and must reflect that specific minority’s modes of life. This definition hinges on the analysis of the author’s ethnicity and on the themes of his/her writing, thus ignoring the role of the reader in the process of literary interpretation. To fill this gap, the present study asks what makes a text "ethnic" from the perspective of the reader model, the hypothetical person who is the target audience of a literary text. Taking five texts by contemporary Chinese authors as case studies, this article suggests that the content of a literary text—not the author’s ethnicity—determines whether a text is perceived as "ethnic." For this reason, the article introduces the notion of "literature about ethnic minorities" as a tool of literary analysis that allows foregrounding modes of literary expression such as language use and literary themes rather than ethnic administrative categories
The Dialectics of Hope and Despair Twisting the Biblical Message in Lu Xun’s “Medicine”
Full text linkLu Xun’s oeuvre includes numerous explicit references to the Christian message, the books of the Bible, Jesus and other biblical characters, which all prove the author’s intellectual familiarity with Christianity. Previous studies have also pointed out that in the short story “Medicine”, Lu Xun surreptitiously embedded characters and allusions – as well as adopted a narrative structure – inspired by the Gospel accounts of the Passion. Such Christian references have been interpreted as a literary strategy to reflect on the Chinese national character. What has gone unnoticed is that, despite several parallels, “Medicine” also deviates from accounts of the Passion in three significant ways: the martyr is not the protagonist; the conclusion is deliberately ambiguous; and the story is stripped of, and yet longing for, the salvific message pervading the Gospels. In this article, I argue that the twisted, allegorical references to the Passion express one of Lu Xun’s paramount preoccupations, namely whether it is worth to sacrifice oneself in the attempt to awaken the masses. In this way, the transfigured figure of Jesus becomes the narrative locus on which Lu Xun expresses his interior vacillation between hope and despair
Chapter Negotiating with the tradition: representations of fish in Alai’s fictional writing
Full text linkTibet has long been orientalized in fictional representations. Taking as a case study two texts by Alai, this paper investigates how a traditional Tibetan cultural trait–the fish taboo–is mobilized to complicate the representation of Tibetan culture. By describing the fish taboo Alai points at Tibet's cultural specificity, which in virtue of its exoticism can catch the attention of non-Tibetan readers. At the same time, however, Alai equips his characters with psychological depth, showing their contrasting inner emotions of attraction and repulsion toward fish. In this sense, Alai subtly points at the fallacies of flat representations of Tibet, thus dismantling them from within
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Ethnicity in Print Media: Alternative Framings of the Short Story ‘The Gray Robe
No full textPrior research on ethnic minority literature (shaoshu minzu wenxue) has primarily focused on “ground-level” analysis, namely close reading of literary texts by authors registered as members of one of the PRC-officially recognized ethnic minorities. In this paper, instead, I consider the “external” framings assigned by publishers to a literary text. “The Gray Robe”—a short story by Hui Muslim author Shi Shuqing—serves as case study. Publishers have framed this story as “ethnic literature” but also as regional, Chinese, and Chinese Muslim literature. These competing framings, I claim, are not simple promotional devices. Rather, they are indexical of the latent discourses that posit a civilized literary center versus an unrefined literary periphery. Investigating how publishers package literary works for readers’ consumption enables an understanding of the tacit power dynamics within the modern literary field of China
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Unmasking power dynamics in ethnic literature
Full text linkHumanities: 2nd Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)Chinese population is divided in 56 ethnic groups (minzu). From the nation-state perspective, an ethnicity is a clear-cut category: one either belongs to it or does not. In the domains of Chinese ethnic literature (shaoshu minzu wenxue) and Chinese ethnic literary studies (shaoshu minzu wenxue yanjiu), boundaries are determined by the ethnicity of the author or by the ethnic characteristics associated with a literary text. Ethnicity is hence pivotal in governing the classification of literary texts and canalizing scholarly debate. In this paper, I take as a case study the Hui, one of the largest ethnic groups in China, to challenge (1) the notion of ethnicity as a monolithic and clearly defined entity and (2) the mainstream approach of compartmentalizing authors and literary texts according to their alleged ethnicity. Instead of debating definitions of Huiness, I advocate for displacing the debate on works by and about the Hui.A five-year embargo was granted for this item
Ethnic Minority Literature in the PRC
No full text“Ethnic minority literature” (shaoshu minzu wenxue) is the umbrella-term used to refer to the literary production—both in oral and written forms—of the People’s Republic of China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities. This seemingly straightforward definition is, however, problematic when applied to specific literary works and to specific authors. The notion of ethnic diversity has, in fact, shifted throughout China’s history. For long, the concept of Chinese ethnicity had been based on the proximity to Confucian cultural norms, to then become institutionalized during the Republican period with the notion of the Five People of China (wuzu gonghe), and subsequently substituted by the PRC’s taxonomical system that came to recognize one majority group (the Han) and fifty-five ethnic minorities. Given competing notions of ethnicity, the classification of a literary text and of its author are often contested for pre-PRC Chinese literary works. Another dispute hinges on the author’s ethnic identity and on the content of a literary work. Some authors are in fact of mixed ethnic background and/or do not write about themes immediately related to “their” ethnic minority. While most ethnic minority authors write solely in Chinese, some authors— though rarely —write also or only using other languages. More common are cases of other authors who intersperse their Chinese with terms from ethnic topolects creating a linguistic and culturally hybrid literary works. A key feature of ethnic minority literature, especially since the early 1980s, consists in the emergence of institutional networks constituted of research centres,
professional associations for scholars and authors, and literary prizes
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