THE IMAGOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE OVERSEAS CHINESE LITERATURE

T. Vechorynska; O. Vorobei

doi:10.15407/orientw2021.01.093

THE IMAGOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE OVERSEAS CHINESE LITERATURE

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https://doi.org/10.15407/orientw2021.01.093

T. Vechorynska

Institute of Philology, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6942-4237

O. Vorobei

Institute of Philology, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4956-8943

Abstract

Overseas Chinese literature refers to literary works written in Chinese by the Chinese living outside of China. Rooted in the soil of Chinese culture, Overseas Chinese literature appears as a unique literary phenomenon widespread throughout the world and created amidst foreign cultures. Overseas Chinese writers find themselves under a double cultural background. In their writings, there are many literary representations of different cultures’ meeting, collision, and merging. The paper suggests that the imagology method may answer the question of how Chinese diaspora members define themselves as Chinese to construct their own identities as opposed to everything else, they regard as non-Chinese. With the application of the methods of Western and Chinese Schools of Comparative Literature and their respective interpretations of global li-terary processes, comparative literary imagology is discussed against its theoretical and historical background and questions such highly disputable categories as ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Chinese consciousness’. The article provides an imagological interpretation of the Self and the Other distinction in Oiled Paper Umbrella by Chinese-Filipino writer Pei Qiong. It is proposed to consider the intertext of a given national representation as a trope, and thus to study semantics and poetics of a transnational individual representation. The analysis of modern critical approaches to the Overseas Chinese literature shows that the vector of critical comprehension of this literary phenomenon is gradually shifting from the ethnic paradigm to the transnational, transcultural interpretation of a person’s connection with the mother culture. The article investigates how the transcultural images are constructed in the literary imagination space and how they are represen-ted in a literary text. The special emphasis is placed on the methods of comparative literary imagology that considers the intrinsic textual peculiarities beyond the extrinsic ethnocentric concepts. It is shown that transcultural images employed in the Chinese-Swedish writer Wan Zhi’s The Woman in a Trench Coat cannot be narrowed down to mere contextualization of the Self-the Other dyad, which is considered as a point of profound cultural significance in the field of Overseas Chinese literature research.

How to Cite

Vechorynska, T., & Vorobei, O. (2021). THE IMAGOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE OVERSEAS CHINESE LITERATURE. The World of the Orient, (1 (110), 93-101. https://doi.org/10.15407/orientw2021.01.093

Article views: 99 | PDF Downloads: 83

Keywords

comparative literary imagology, other, Overseas Chinese Literature, Self, transcultural identity

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