Journal articles on the topic 'Hong Kong horror fiction'
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Wang, Kai, and Nan Li. "ANALYSIS OF HONG KONG ZOMBIE MOVIES AUDIOVISUAL LANGUAGE IN THE 1980S." International Journal of Law, Government and Communication 7, no. 29 (September 1, 2022): 18–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.35631/ijlgc.729002.
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As a subcultural type of genre film, Hong Kong zombie films play an important role in Hong Kong films. Hong Kong zombie films through visual languages such as color, light, lens, and auditory language such as language, music, and audio create a horror atmosphere and infect the emotions of the audience. The use of audiovisual language also implies the ideological representation of the collision between China and the West in Hong Kong in the 1980s.
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Marchetti, Gina. "Documentary and democracy: An interview with Evans Chan." Asian Cinema 33, no. 2 (October 1, 2022): 257–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac_00059_7.
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Gina Marchetti’s interview with NewYork-based Hong Kong independent filmmaker Evans Chan took place after Chan had said goodbye to his former home and to nearly three decades of filmmaking in the city, following the introduction of Hong Kong’s National Security Law in 2020. Her interview focuses on Chan’s non-fiction filmmaking, particularly his recent films dealing with Hong Kong’s two protest movements of 2014 and 2019, namely Raise the Umbrellas 撐傘 () and We Have Boots 我們有雨靴 (). While the latter part of the interview concerns Chan’s thoughts on the relationship between documentaries and democracy, it also explores the signature aesthetics of his films and an underlying ‘story of Hong Kong’, which the interviewer sees as a consistent thread running through his fiction and non-fiction filmography. A wide range of cinematic, literary, sociopolitical and philosophical influences in his work emerge in the course of this in-depth interview with the filmmaker.
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Sia, Tiffany. "New Territories." Film Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2023): 9–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.9.
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What is the “Hong Kong” cathected through film, both past and present? The central project shared by parallel visions of Hong Kong––former and contemporary, narrative fiction and nonfiction documentary, commercial and independent––is that of how to encounter and (re)vivify the past through cinema. But how is it possible to move toward the past, especially the recent past, without a nostalgia tinged by sentimentality or an inherent longing for a fantasy of the past? Chan Tze-woon’s Blue Island offers up a unique challenge to Hong Kong cinema, contesting the former tropes of the sentimental and all its nostalgic reckonings with the past. In theorizing towards a new Hong Kong cinema, this article examines the legacy of its golden age against emerging counterpublics––fugitive, exilic and postnational––that profoundly reshape Hong Kong cinema today within and beyond the local.
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Yeung, Jessica Siu-yin. "Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature and Shih Shu-Ching's Hong Kong Stories." Cultural History 12, no. 2 (October 2023): 224–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0288.
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This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei's case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.
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Bachner, Andrea. "From China to Hong Kong with Horror Transcultural Consumption in Fruit Chan’sDumplings." Interventions 20, no. 8 (April 11, 2018): 1137–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2018.1460217.
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Xin Yi, Wong, Mansour Amini, and Maryam Alipour. "Genre and Translation Style in Chinese Translation of Hollywood Blockbuster Movie Titles in Mainland China and Hong Kong." Journal of Modern Languages 33, no. 2 (December 16, 2023): 120–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.22452/jml.vol33no2.7.
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The title of a movie is the first to attract the audience's attention. Poorly translated movie titles may result in a “low box office”, as translators in different countries have their styles and preferences in translating film titles, which might eventually result in different translations of the same movie title and cause confusion to the audience. This qualitative research used exploratory induction to investigate the influence of genre and translation style on the Chinese translation of Hollywood blockbuster movie titles in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Titles of 300 Chinese movies produced between 2001 and 2020 were purposefully selected from the top 50 Hollywood movies in the adventure, horror, and action genres. Genre was found to be slightly effective in the choice of translation style and strategies. Among the three genres, horror was found to have the greatest influence on the choice of translation strategy. It was concluded that translators from Mainland China were more conservative in title translation compared to translators from Hong Kong, whose attempt was to create innovative translations. The findings may have some theoretical and practical implications for film translators, book translators, advertising translators, translation trainers, and trainees.
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Yee Lin Ho, Elaine. "Women in Exile: Gender and Community in Hong Kong Fiction." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29, no. 1 (March 1994): 29–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/002198949402900104.
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Shen, Shuang. "Popular Literature in the Inter-imperial Space of Hong Kong and Singapore/Malaya." Prism 19, no. 2 (September 1, 2022): 301–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9966657.
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Abstract This article addresses the neglect toward popular literary networks with Hong Kong in the Cold War period by influential Mahua scholars. Aiming to make way for a more robust discourse of cultural politics in tandem with a regional conceptualization of Sinophone cultural production, the article proposes to understand popular forms such as romance fiction as arising from and coconstituting a regional Sinosphere that can only be understood, following Laura Doyle's recent study, as inter-imperial. Offering a reading of the Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang's romantic fiction and immigrant stories, I show how the stories signify a geopolitical reckoning with the Cold War patterning of the world. This perspective offers more ways for us to evaluate how the regional literary field intersected with the Cold War beyond the singular defense of its “literariness.”
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Yung, Faye Dorcas. "The Silencing of Children's Literature Publishing in Hong Kong." International Research in Children's Literature 13, Supplement (July 2020): 159–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2020.0344.
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Children's literature publishing in Hong Kong is supposed to enjoy the freedom of a free market economy and legal autonomy. However, the market structure and the titles available in the market dominated by imported titles reveal that children's books published in Hong Kong have little room to feature the local voice. The market conditions are tough and publishers are incentivised to publish for the larger Sinosphere market. As a result, Cantonese is absent in imported texts annotated with either Mandarin phonetics ruby characters in Hanyu Pinyin or Zhuyin symbols. Non-fiction picturebooks feature a version of history that is biased towards the Chinese Communist Party political rhetoric. Hong Kong subjectivity thus struggles to find space to be represented; usually it is found in publications by smaller independent publishers.
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WU, Meng. "Fanning Out Possibilities: Dung Kai-cheung and the Multiplicities of Time." Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 34, no. 2 (December 2022): 420–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0020.
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Hong Kong has brought to world literature some of the most prolific and best-loved fiction writers in modern Chinese history. Dung Kai-cheung is one of them — a Hong Kong-based writer who has found the city to be a constant source of inspiration. This article discusses the significance of multiplicity in Dung’s fictional representation of Hong Kong (“the V-City”), focusing on his 2007 novel Histories of Time: The Luster of Mute Porcelain. In this novel, Dung explores the narrative possibility of perceiving Hong Kong as a multi-historical space through the lens of multiplying temporalities. I have coined the term “V-shaped time” to refer to this multiplication of characters and archaeology of ideas. Time, in Dung’s work, fans out with multiple possibilities of individual and collective experiences in history, with mirrored Vs resembling an hourglass. In this stratified narrative, characters create their fictional selves in their own writing. Identifying the creative self as a literary architect, Dung’s fictional writing challenges the reader to rethink a local history that has been marginalized in the linear narrative of colonial modernity.
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Cahill, Suzanne. "What to Fear and How to Protect Yourself: Daoism and Hong Kong Horror Movies." Journal of Daoist Studies 4, no. 1 (2011): 202–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dao.2011.0010.
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오계영 and 임춘미. "The Construction of Hong Kong Identity in Xi Xi’s Works of Fiction." Journal of Study on Language and Culture of Korea and China ll, no. 26 (June 2011): 293–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.16874/jslckc.2011..26.013.
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Chen, Jack W. "Love and Women in Early Chinese Fiction. By Daniel Hsieh. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2008. 331 pp. $39.00 (cloth)." Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 1 (January 27, 2009): 268–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021911809000242.
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Lashin, Roman. " Hong Kong Scholar’s Troubled Identity in Dorothy Tse’s <em>Owlish</em>." Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature 2, no. 1 (December 20, 2023): 16–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.22599/wcj.42.
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Owlish is a part-realist part-surreal tale of a disgruntled professor in Hong Kong’s fictional double Nevers who unexpectedly falls in love with a ballerina doll. The novel’s plot unfolds against the backdrop of the growing pressure on Hong Kong’s freedoms and its very identity resulting in protests – events concealed by the veil of Dorothy Tse’s inventive language but still unmistakably discernable. This essay approaches Owlish as an academic novel i.e. literary work concerned with university professors and the vicissitudes of their lives within and outside the campus walls. The novel's protagonist, Professor Q, appears to be a brilliant cosmopolitan intellectual on the surface. Yet, deep down, he grapples with conflicting identities, mirroring the predicaments faced by Hong Kong itself. This essay’s focus lies in examining the portrayal of scholar in Owlish and comparing it to those depicted by the PRC and Sinophone writers. By doing so, the essay traces the different traits that construct Hong Kong scholar’s troubled identity, for instance, traditional Chinese literatus, renaissance-esque free-spirited thinker, and overloaded contemporary academic. Elaine Showalter observes that the best works of the academic fiction genre are not merely literary accounts of academic routine but boldly play with the genre itself and comment on pressing contemporary issues. Accordingly, the essay’s primary emphasis is on how Hong Kong professor’s identity crisis reflects the precarious state of the city’s intellectual sphere and what the outcome Tse warns against in her academic narrative.
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Li, Jessica Tsui-yan. "Digital Culture in Hong Kong Canadian Communities: Literary Analysis of Yi Shu's Fiction." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 44, no. 2 (2017): 191–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/crc.2017.0017.
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Jayawickrama, Sharanya. "Metonymic Figures: Cultural Representations of Foreign Domestic Helpers and Discourses of Diversity in Hong Kong." Cultural Diversity in China 3, no. 1 (June 26, 2018): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cdc-2017-0006.
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Abstract Foreign Domestic Helpers account for nearly half of Hong Kong’s total ethnic minority population and are therefore integral to any discussion of diversity in the postcolonial, global Chinese city. In Asia, discourses of diversity have evolved from the juncture of complex historical, political, and cultural factors including colonialism, postcoloniality, traditional and precolonial customs and values, religious and spiritual beliefs, as well as Western-derived liberal-democratic discourses of rights and citizenship. “Diversity” has been identified as one of the core values and attributes of the territory by the Hong Kong Government yet it is not a concept that is carefully interrogated and delineated. This essay examines discourses of diversity via analysis of a varied set of cultural representations of Foreign Domestic Helpers, including a television programme and advertisements, a work of short literary fiction, online erotic fiction, social media, as well as an example of multi-media artwork. Taken together, these representative forms provide insight into the cultural imaginary that shapes private and public discourse and perception. Using an approach informed by both cognitive linguistics and postcolonial studies, the essay focuses on metonymic techniques, for example, doubling and substitution to argue that representations of Foreign Domestic Helpers reveal the anxieties, fears, and desires of the dominant culture. The essay shows that the Foreign Domestic Helper becomes a critical figure around whom linked questions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class in the majority ethnic Chinese population of Hong Kong circulate.
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Murniati, Tri. "One place two stories: Unravelling Indonesian domestic workers’ migrant journey in Hong Kong." Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 12, no. 2 (October 1, 2021): 495–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/cjmc_00047_1.
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Following the year 2002, Indonesian migrant domestic workers (IDWs) gradually transform the generic perception that they are merely physical workers. They have attracted a different form of attention as they began to publish novels, short stories, poetry anthologies and non-fiction writings. In this paper, two books on IDW ‐ namely, Susanti’s Tentang Sedih di Victoria Park (‘About sadness in Victoria Park’) and Sorrita’s Penari Naga Kecil (‘The little dragon dancer’) ‐ are examined and analysed to further explore the subtext underlying the stories. I argue that IDWs’ narratives offer an alternate narrative that indicates IDWs fighting back on the imposed stereotypes underlining the importance of migrant voice. Both books provide insights into IDWs’ lives in Hong Kong, which illustrate IDWs’ migrant experience.
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Zhang, Jiaxue. "A Study of Urban Writing in My City from The Perspective of Fairy Tales." International Journal of Education and Humanities 5, no. 3 (November 11, 2022): 89–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.54097/ijeh.v5i3.2458.
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This paper reconstructs a different textual city from previous ones by starting from a fairy-tale perspective as well as adopting a unique artistic approach of narrative modernity. Xixi's My City, taking the narrative style as the starting point, by exploring the narrative subject, narrative method and narrative structure, writing light urban literature, organically integrating urban aesthetics and textual fiction, properly embodying the complexity of Hong Kong literature and expanding the readability of text, and deeply peeking into the value and significance behind urban writing research.
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Shu, Jack. "Ethnodrama with Hong Kong problem gamblers and their family: between ethnographic reality and dramatic fiction." Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 25, no. 2 (September 18, 2019): 302–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2019.1667225.
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Venkatesh, Vinodh. "Andrew Hock Soon Ng, Intimating the Sacred: Religion in English Language Malaysian Fiction, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press 2014, 281 pp., ISBN 978-988-8083-21-3." Religion and Gender 4, no. 2 (February 19, 2014): 252–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18785417-00402017.
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LaFleur, Frances, and Michael S. Duke. "Worlds of Modern Chinese Fiction: Short Stories and Novellas from the People's Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong." World Literature Today 67, no. 1 (1993): 233. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40149034.
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Hillenbrand, Margaret. "Murakami Haruki in Greater China: Creative Responses and the Quest for Cosmopolitanism." Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 3 (August 2009): 715–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021911809990039.
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The relationship between popular culture and East Asian identity is now an established field of enquiry, with the products of Japan's mass media industries—television series, pop stars, and manga—still providing much of the fuel for debate. This paper, however, moves away from the dominant notion of “culture as industry,” and explores animated personal responses to the fiction of Japanese writer Murakami Haruki in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan through art house cinema, popular fiction, and online creative communities. The vogue for Murakami has swept across the region in recent years, and for many of those inspired by his work, it is Murakami's role as a conduit to cosmopolitan cultural citizenship that is so alluring. Yet rather than crude imitation, the filmmakers, writers, and Internet fans analyzed here misappropriate the “Murakami mood” in different ways, and in the process, they reveal the diverse meanings that attach to cosmopolitanism across contemporary East Asia.
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Venkatesh, Vinodh. "Review of Andrew Hock Soon Ng, Intimating the Sacred: Religion in English Language Malaysian Fiction, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press 2011, 281 pp., ISBN 978-988-8083-21-3." Religion and Gender 4, no. 2 (December 21, 2014): 252. http://dx.doi.org/10.18352/rg.9842.
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Coover, Roderick, David Jhave Johnston, and Scott Rettberg. "The Poetics of Combinatory Cinema: David Jhave Johnston interviews Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg." SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 4, no. 1 (December 15, 2014): 108–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/se.v4i1.20329.
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For the past several years filmmaker Roderick Coover and fiction writer Scott Rettberg have collaborated on a series of film and digital media projects that address climate change, environmental catastrophe, cross-cultural communication and combinatory poetics. Working between Philadelphia, USA, where Coover directs the graduate programme in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, and Bergen, Norway, where Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. Their projects, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, Three Rails Live (with Nick Montfort) and Toxi•City, deal thematically with contemporary and past moments of environmental change and human loss, and formally with interdisciplinary practice and combinatory poetics. Coover and Rettberg were interviewed by digital poet and experimental filmmaker David Jhave Johnston, Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong.
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Yeung, Chui Ling, Chi Fai Cheung, Wai Ming Wang, Eric Tsui, and Wing Bun Lee. "Managing knowledge in the construction industry through computational generation of semi-fiction narratives." Journal of Knowledge Management 20, no. 2 (April 4, 2016): 386–414. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/jkm-07-2015-0253.
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Purpose Narratives are useful to educate novices to learn from the past in a safe environment. For some high-risk industries, narratives for lessons learnt are costly and limited, as they are constructed from the occurrence of accidents. This paper aims to propose a new approach to facilitate narrative generation from existing narrative sources to support training and learning. Design/methodology/approach A computational narrative semi-fiction generation (CNSG) approach is proposed, and a case study was conducted in a statutory body in the construction industry in Hong Kong. Apart from measuring the learning outcomes gained by participants through the new narratives, domain experts were invited to evaluate the performance of the CNSG approach. Findings The performance of the CNSG approach is found to be effective in facilitating new narrative generation from existing narrative sources and to generate synthetic semi-fiction narratives to support and educate individuals to learn from past lessons. The new narratives generated by the CNSG approach help students learn and remember important things and learning points from the narratives. Domain experts agree that the validated narratives are useful for training and learning purposes. Originality/value This study presents a new narrative generation process for a high-risk industry, e.g. the construction industry. The CNSG approach incorporates the technologies of natural language processing and artificial intelligence to computationally identify narrative gaps in existing narrative sources and proposes narrative fragments to generate new semi-fiction narratives. Encouraging results were gained through the case study.
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Forman, Ross. "Projecting from Possession Point: Hong Kong, Hybridity, and the Shifting Grounds of Imperialism in James Dalziel's Turn-of-the-Century Fiction." Criticism 46, no. 4 (2005): 533–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/crt.2005.0014.
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Joana, Joana, and Liliek Soelistyo. "Call Me Bathsheba: A Novel Exploring the Impacts of Patriarchal Culture on the Prostitution Industry." K@ta Kita 9, no. 3 (January 6, 2022): 348–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.9744/katakita.9.3.348-355.
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This creative work follows the journey of the daughter of a prostitute, in her attempt to survive after being kicked out of the house and find the biological mother whom she never met. It explores the theme of patriarchal culture that impacts prostitution industry and the complication of it.This realistic fiction novel was set in three countries which are China (Hong-Kong), Singapore, and Indonesia. The story highlights the reasons women enter prostitution explored in Barry’s The Prostitution of Sexuality theory, and the physical and pyscho-social impacts of slut-shaming happened to women prostitute explored in Benoit et al’s Theory of Social Stigma among Prostitutes.It will also be elaborated on how patriarchy impacts both issues. Through these theories and project, I find that patriachy causes many women decided to enter prostitution as it’s the best choice they have at hand even though the work itself oftentime harms them physically and pyscho-socially through the whore-stigma that operates on the micro, meso, and macro level of their lives. Keywords: patriarchal culture, women prostitution, whore-stigma, slut-shaming.
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Long, Chao. "Writing the Hong Kong self: fiction, artifacts and the making of history in Dung Kai-cheung’s Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (April 3, 2023): 238–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2182938.
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Sorrell, David, and Gavin T. L. Brown. "A comparative study of two interventions to support reading comprehension in primary-aged students." International Journal of Comparative Education and Development 20, no. 1 (March 13, 2018): 67–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijced-08-2017-0018.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the explicit teaching of information text schema with vocabulary instruction to primary-aged students in Hong Kong international education. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected through three quasi-experimental studies with different age groups and participants. Each study divided participants into two randomly assigned groups, either informational texts (IT) or vocabulary building (VB). Impact was evaluated with gain scores on a standardized reading comprehension test and researcher-designed cloze tests of fiction and nonfiction passages. Findings The explicit teaching of IT can benefit student reading comprehension from an early age, particularly to first language (L1) English students and possibly second language (L2) English learners. School reading programmes should include opportunities for students to experience IT (nonfiction) and fiction materials, and build their vocabulary through incidental learning and explicit teaching. For IT, they should be exposed to: layout – e.g., headings, sub-headings, glossary, and index; and content – photographs and specific/technical vocabulary. For fiction-based texts and VB, the following themes should be covered by younger aged students: antonyms, synonyms, and affixes. Research limitations/implications Several limitations apply to this study which will need to be addressed in future studies. These include: the random sampling of students from the overall student population was not an option, given the necessity of voluntary participation and avoiding disruption to school routines. This study used meta-analysis to aggregate results across multiple comparisons largely because of the extremely small samples available. The data show large standard errors as a consequence of small numbers of participants. Hence, the current results, notwithstanding the power of meta-analysis, need to be validated with much larger samples in future studies. Originality/value This paper suggests that greater comprehension and cloze performance among L1 students was found due to the teaching of IT compared to vocabulary training, with the reverse result for L2 English learners.
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Banh, Jenny. "“I Have an Accent in Every Language I Speak!”: Shadow History of One Chinese Family’s Multigenerational Transnational Migrations." Genealogy 3, no. 3 (July 1, 2019): 36. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3030036.
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According to scholar and Professor Wang Gungwu, there are three categories of Chinese overseas documents: formal (archive), practical (print media), and expressive (migrant writings such as poetry). This non-fiction creative essay documents what Edna Bonacich describes as an “middleman minority” family and how we have migrated to four different nation-city states in four generations. Our double minority status in one country where we were discriminated against helped us psychologically survive in another country. My family history ultimately exemplifies the unique position “middleman minority” families have in the countries they migrate to and how the resulting discrimination that often accompanies this position can work as a psychological advantage when going to a new country. We also used our cultural capital to survive in each new country. In particular, this narrative highlights the lasting psychological effects of the transnational migration on future generations. There is a wall of shame, fear, and traumas in my family’s migration story that still pervades today. My family deals with everything with silence, obfuscation, and anger. It has taken me twenty years to recollect a story so my own descendants can know where we came from. Thus, this is a shadow history that will add to the literature on Sino-Southeast Asian migration and remigration out to the United States. Specifically, my family’s migration began with my grandfather leaving Guangdong, China to Saigon, Vietnam (1935), to Hong Kong, (1969) (then a British Colony), and eventually to the United States (1975). This article explains why my family migrated multiple times across multiple generations before eventually ending up in California. Professor Wang urges librarians, archivists, and scholars to document and preserve the Chinese migrants’ expressive desires of migrant experiences and this expressive memoir piece answers that call.
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Anderson, Marston. "The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction. By Mau-sang Ng. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press and Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1988. xvi, 332 pp." Journal of Asian Studies 48, no. 2 (May 1989): 370–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2057409.
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Багаутдинова, Гульзада Гадульяновна. "The Frigate Pallada by I. A. Goncharov as a Literary Monument of Artistic Ethnology." ТРАДИЦИОННАЯ КУЛЬТУРА, no. 5 (December 10, 2019): 181–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.26158/tk.2019.20.5.015.
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Жанровая природа «Фрегата “Паллада”» И. А. Гончарова сложна и эклектична. Несмотря на ее мозаичность, структура текста отличается четкостью, она выверена и хорошо продумана. В этом произведении повествуется о разных странах, континентах, а также населяющих их народах и этносах. В статье рассматривается одна из глав книги с точки зрения художественно-этнологического дискурса: автор-повествователь описывает нравы, род занятий, этнические особенности китайского народа, но делает это весьма живо, занимательно, эмоционально, т. е. на художественном уровне. Основным композиционным принципом произведения «Фрегат “Паллада”» становится сопоставление: выявляются сходные и отличительные признаки китайского и других этносов (американцев, англичан, русских). Кроме того, показаны и этнические особенности разных групп китайцев (китайцы Шанхая, Гонконга, Сингапура). В результате сопоставительного анализа автор приходит к выводу, что глава «Шанхай» написана большим писателем-беллетристом, не документалистом: Гончаров использует художественные приемы, определившие своеобразие его художественного мира, в том числе и романного (разнообразные ритмообразующие факторы; изящные и тонкие проявления комического начала; «архитектурную» структурированность; четкую и аргументированную авторскую позицию; гуманизм). The genre nature of The Frigate "Pallada" by Ivan Goncharov is complex and eclectic. Despite its mosaic character, the structure of the text looks precise and elaborate. The novel tells about foreign countries, continents, and nations living there. The paper focuses on one chapter of the novel; its artistic ethnology is regarded. The author-narrator depicts customs, occupations, and ethnic peculiarities of the Chinese people in a vivid, amusing, emotional way thus providing an artistic level of the description. The main principle of plot structure is the one of comparison: similar and peculiar features of the Chinese and other nations (Americans, Englishmen, Russians) are defined. Moreover, ethnic peculiarities of various groups among the Chinese are displayed (people of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore). Summing up the comparative analysis, the author concludes that the chapter entitled Shanghai seems to be written by a belletrist rather than by a documentary writer. Ivan Goncharov resorts to artistic devices typical of his fiction and novels (a variety of rhythm making factors; graceful and subtle manifestations of the comic; architectural structure; author’s viewpoint, well-grounded and precise; humanism)
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Eide, Elisabeth. "Michael S. Duke (ed.): Worlds of modern Chinese fiction: short stories and novellas from the People's Republic, Taiwan and Hong Kong. xiii, 344 pp. Armonk, N.Y. and London: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 1991: $45 (paper $16.95)." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 55, no. 3 (October 1992): 580–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0041977x00004122.
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Brandauer, Frederick P. "Chinese Middlebrow Fiction from the Ch'ing and Early Republican Eras. Edited by Liu Ts'un-yan, with the assistance of John Minford. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984. viii, 372 pp. Notes on Contributors, Notes on Illustrations. $35." Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (May 1985): 599–601. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2056289.
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McDougall, Bonnie S. "Ng Mau-sang: The Russian hero in modern Chinese fiction. (SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture.) xv, 332 pp. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press; Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, State University of New York Press, 1988. $39.50 (paper $12.95)." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1990): 175–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0041977x00021807.
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Pollard, D. E. "Stephen C. Soong and John Minford (ed.): Tress on the mountain: an anthology of new Chinese Writing. (Renditions Book Series.) 396 pp. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984. - Michael S. Duke(ed.): Contemporary Chinese literature: an anthology of post-Mao Fiction and poetry. (An expanded version of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Col. 16, No. 3,1984.) 137 pp. New York: M.E.Sharpe, Inc., 1985. - Zhao Zhenkai: Waves. Transl. by Bonnie S. McDougall and Susette Ternet Cooke. 216 pp. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1985." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50, no. 3 (October 1987): 587. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0041977x00040039.
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Qin, Qintong. "Comparison of Translation of Movie Titles in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—Transcreation in Restricted Film Titles." Arts, Culture and Language 1, no. 7 (June 6, 2024). http://dx.doi.org/10.61173/3kadj748.
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Nowadays, it has become more common to edit film titles through transcreation to better align with local audiences’ aesthetic preferences and cultural values. Therefore, studying the translation of movie titles in different regions, such as Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, has also become a popular topic. However, most studies have not classified the films but compared them generally. Therefore, the theme of this study is to compare the translation of restricted film titles in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan through transcreation. This research compares the transcreation of action movies, horror movies, and erotic movie titles in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, summarizes the translation differences in the three regions, and explores the reasons behind the differences. The study finds that in Mainland China, literal translation is often used, and if the content is sensitive, a tactful transcreation will be chosen. However, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the translation preference for restricted film titles is to translate them by recreating a title based on the original title’s meaning, using puns and some exaggerated words. This study suggests that the film censorship system, language differences, and social atmosphere cause the differences.
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Chao, Yitian. "Legend and Fairy Tale: Research of the Urban Texts of Eileen Chang and Xi Xi." Arts, Culture and Language 1, no. 7 (June 6, 2024). http://dx.doi.org/10.61173/p0bp1s96.
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As a category of literature springing up in a transition period, urban literature has more or less ingredients of modernity and territoriality. Hong Kong has unique urban characteristics thanks to its twisted fate and multiculturalism, which are the background of many writers’ works. As a result, works about Hong Kong are excellent materials for research in urban literature. Eileen Chang and Xi Xi, both born in Shanghai and settled in Hong Kong for a long time, have complexes varying from cityscape, portrayal, and living habits, which were affected by colonialism at different times. The great changes in Hong Kong during the long period of colonization are obvious in the works of these two writers, leading to different emotions. This paper chooses one fiction by Eileen Chang and Xi Xi separately to feel the pulse of the city of Hong Kong in different periods, enquiring into the colonial evolution and adding new research ideas for Hong Kong literature. By implementing this study, it can be proven that the city culture of Hong Kong in literature has changed from conflicting to self-consistent under the influence of colonialism.
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Zak, Leila. "Tierra y mar." Latin American Literary Review 50, no. 101 (October 27, 2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.26824/lalr.398.
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Leila Zak writes in English and Spanish. She won Oxford’s Spanish Flash Fiction Competition for her piece ’Salvavidas’ in 2022. Her research interests, however, are cross-continental. Inspired by her volunteer work with refugees in Hong Kong, she wrote a debut novel Displaced and Erased (which was self-translated into Spanish). The following collection of three poems, Tierra y mar, presents an exploration of the generational silencing of indigenous languages and cultures in Latin America that has come with colonialism and forced-assimilation. She lives in Hong Kong.
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Chao, Di-kai, and Riccardo Moratto. "Poetics of Propensity in Sinophone Fiction An Analysis of Lai Hsiang-yin and Lee Wai Yi’s Ghost Narrative." 59 | 2023, no. 1 (August 29, 2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/annor/2385-3042/2023/01/016.
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This study aims to analyse two novellas, namely “Rain Tree” (“Yudou shu” 雨豆樹) by Lai Hsiang-yin 賴香吟 (2017) from Taiwan and “Away” (“Li” 離) by Lee Wai Yi 李維怡 (2018) from Hong Kong. This article attempts to understand how non-corporeal or non-representational ghost narratives become a mobile strategy for re-investigating mainstream narratives or the violence of modernity. Through the ‘de-temporalisation’ of the city and the momentary folding of time and space, Rain Tree reconsiders the meaning of Taiwan as a superior signifier. Away endeavours to reveal the ghostly nature underneath the instrumental rationality of Hong Kong, tapping into the fluctuating heterogeneity of modernity. This study also draws on Sinophone articulation to juxtapose two texts belonging to Taiwan and Hong Kong, thus highlighting how ghosts become a poetics of ‘propensity’ (shi 勢) within the Sinophone framework. These spectral entities transcend the confines of conventional categorisations and challenge the fixedness of ‘roots’. This strategy does not follow the logic of psychoanalytic selfhood or postcolonial grand narratives, but rather a fluid nature and potential.
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Marchetti, Gina. "The Networked Storyteller and Her Digital Tale: Film Festivals and Ann Hui’s 'My Way'." Winter 2021 1, no. 2 (January 7, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/gs.1702.
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In cooperation with China’s Youku online channel, the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society commissioned Ann Hui to make a short film, My Way, to be part of an omnibus production, Beautiful 2012. In order to be considered for this commission, Hui needed to be acknowledged at international film festivals and be a recognized auteur known in the Asian region and beyond. Without Hui’s festival credentials and the reputation of the other directors in the curated production, the collected shorts would have little appeal to other programmers and distributors. Although she has famously resisted the label of “film auteur” in the past, Ann Hui undoubtedly stands as the most celebrated female director based in Hong Kong active before and after the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) in 1997.Given the length of her career as well as the impressive critical and scholarly attention her work has garnered, Hui serves as an exemplary case study of how film festivals play a vital role in the career of a Hong Kong female fiction film director. In the case of My Way, the festival circuit permits a specific type of production and digital distribution that enables Hui to craft a network narrative, which places the transition of its protagonist from male to female within a broader community connected through a shared gender identity. By analyzing Ann Hui’s presence at the festivals in Venice and Hong Kong, as well as the link between her festival exposure and her Internet success, My Way offers insight into the circuitous paths women filmmakers follow in order to tell their stories on transnational screens.
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Solomon, Jonathan D. "Caves of Steel: Mapping Hong Kong in the 21st Century." FOOTPRINT, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.59490/footprint.1.679.
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Hong Kong’s extraordinary density, the results of a unique geography, economy, and political history, is often represented in cramped housing conditions, unusual sectional conditions, and variations on building typologies. This paper argues that Hong Kong’s density, in combination with its climate and consumer economy, has in fact effected a wholesale interiorisation of public society unprecedented in contemporary urban form. 'Caves of Steel' is borrowed from the title of a 1954 novel by science fiction master Isaac Azimov, in which humanity has been divided into interior and exterior factions. The radical separation of public society in Hong Kong that accompanies the growing disparity of interior and exterior urban space is perhaps better understood through Manuel DeLanda’s (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 2002) application of the terms ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ from the physical sciences to a description of abstract space. Through Reiser (Atlas of Novel Tectonics, 2005) ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ properties may be understood in the urban context as competing and collaborating ‘infrastructural’ and ‘topological’ conditions. In Hong Kong the infrastructural (dense interiorised infrastructure of multilevel shopping warrens) and the topological (vast open topology of country parks, new towns, and industrial estates) exist often in immediate proximity, while the gap between their respective public societies continues to grow. Recent proposals for the development of a variety of sites on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour waterfront are examined in detail as a case study of this condition and its attendant effects on mapping complex and three-dimensional urban conditions, on notions of post-colonial and post-industrial image and identity, and on the evolution of public space in an Asian context.
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Solomon, Jonathan D. "Caves of Steel: Mapping Hong Kong in the 21st Century." FOOTPRINT, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.59490/footprint.2.1.679.
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Hong Kong’s extraordinary density, the results of a unique geography, economy, and political history, is often represented in cramped housing conditions, unusual sectional conditions, and variations on building typologies. This paper argues that Hong Kong’s density, in combination with its climate and consumer economy, has in fact effected a wholesale interiorisation of public society unprecedented in contemporary urban form. 'Caves of Steel' is borrowed from the title of a 1954 novel by science fiction master Isaac Azimov, in which humanity has been divided into interior and exterior factions. The radical separation of public society in Hong Kong that accompanies the growing disparity of interior and exterior urban space is perhaps better understood through Manuel DeLanda’s (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 2002) application of the terms ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ from the physical sciences to a description of abstract space. Through Reiser (Atlas of Novel Tectonics, 2005) ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ properties may be understood in the urban context as competing and collaborating ‘infrastructural’ and ‘topological’ conditions. In Hong Kong the infrastructural (dense interiorised infrastructure of multilevel shopping warrens) and the topological (vast open topology of country parks, new towns, and industrial estates) exist often in immediate proximity, while the gap between their respective public societies continues to grow. Recent proposals for the development of a variety of sites on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour waterfront are examined in detail as a case study of this condition and its attendant effects on mapping complex and three-dimensional urban conditions, on notions of post-colonial and post-industrial image and identity, and on the evolution of public space in an Asian context.
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"Corrigendum." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 26, no. 4 (November 2017): 367. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947017728851.
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Jing Yu. Translating ‘others’ as ‘us’ in Huckleberry Finn: dialect, register and the heterogeneity of standard language. Language and Literature, 26(1); 2017: DOI 10.1177/0963947016674131 The following corrections apply: The author’s affiliation should be: Hangzhou Dianzi University/the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China The author wishes to include the following funding acknowledgement: The authors acknowledge support from Zhejiang Philosophy and Social Science Planning Foundation (浙江省哲学社会科学规划课题) [Grant No.15NDJC035YB], and the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (教育部人文社科课题) [Grant No. 15YJC740124]. The author wishes to correct the ‘Author biography’ section as follows: Jing Yu is an associate professor of English in Hangzhou Dianzi University in China. She completed her PhD thesis on the Chinese translation of literary dialects in British and American fiction at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2016. Her thesis investigates how dialects in Huckleberry Finn, Tess and Pygmalion are translated in China, who did that and why. Currently she is interested in sociological studies on translators of literary dialect.
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Lundberg, Anita. "Tropical Imaginaries in Living Cities." eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics 17, no. 2 (September 4, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.25120/etropic.17.2.2018.3651.
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This is the second part of the eTropic special issue theme on Tropical Imaginaries and Living Cities. While the first part of this series concentrated predominately on concrete cities and the material imagination, this second issue explores notions of the tropics and cities through literary and artistic works. Thus in this collection of papers the tropical imaginary comes to the forefront while the metropolis provides the space or canvas for the imagination.Many of the cities called up in this collection have physical presence, places such as Darwin, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Havana, and Kuching. Other cities conjured here may morph into various otherworldly forms such as haunted spaces or spaceships; or dissolve into a hazy backdrop as memory and imagination take the stage. Yet these urban spaces are nevertheless always alive, their virtual presence becomes the matrix that holds the imagination. The literary and creative works examined here flow from martial arts, through literary works including novels, short stories, poetry, and speculative fiction, and then transition into visual art through science-fiction magazine covers, art on walls and heritage arts spaces, to come to a close with film.
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Cheung, Helen Kwan Yee. "Righting Canada’s Wrongs: The Chinese Head Tax and Anti-Chinese Immigration Policies in the Twentieth Century by A. Chan." Deakin Review of Children's Literature 5, no. 1 (July 16, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.20361/g2c596.
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Chan, Arlene. Righting Canada’s Wrongs: The Chinese Head Tax and Anti-Chinese Immigration Policies in the Twentieth Century. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., 2014. Print.This is a non-fiction book about the history of Chinese immigration and settlement in Canada. It takes the reader through a very long historical period that starts from the time the Chinese first stepped foot in Canada in the eighteenth century, through struggling under racial discrimination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to attaining redress and public apology as captured in the title “Righting Canada’s Wrongs”.The title suggests a very serious topic that may not appeal to some readers looking to read for pleasure. However, this is an excellent resource for students doing a school or family genealogy project, or for those with an inquisitive mind. Once the book is opened, the photographs will definitely catch the attention and spark the interest of the reader. The author has skillfully used over 200 rare archival and modern day photographs and real-life audio accounts to make this book into an educational and thought-provoking audio-visual historical document. The only drawback is that the reader has to go back and forth between reading the book and going online to listen to the audio. While the book gives a good account of Chinese Canadian history, it missed the struggles and successes of the Prairie Chinese whose experiences are well-captured in the rich collection of rare archival materials housed in the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library of the University of Alberta, the Glenbow Museum, and the Edmonton Archives.The first chapter introduces the reader to the story by providing a brief historical background. Young readers may not be familiar with the two Opium Wars, British Columbia joining the Canadian Confederation, the First and Second World Wars, and the Chinese head tax redress campaign. Therefore, it will be very helpful if these events can all be put into historical perspectives by specifying the year of occurrence. The back of the book contains valuable references, such as: a “Timeline” diagram, a Glossary, a list of suggested reading, a list of visual credits, and an index to aid the readers. The “Timeline” diagram effectively chronicles significant historical events relevant to the story being told. However, it is inaccurate to say that Hong Kong becomes a British Colony in 1898. Hong Kong is a general name to mean the Island of Hong Kong and its surrounding islets, the Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories. Historically, Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain in 1842, the Kowloon Peninsula ceded in 1860, and the New Territories leased for 99 years from 1898 to 1997. A similar inaccuracy is in the caption for a photograph on page 52 taken in Kowloon. At that point in history, it was a British Colony and not a part of China. This book is more suitable for young readers of grade five and above. They will get more out of reading this book if they are guided by parents or teachers who can help them better understand and appreciate the complex issues and historical occurrences. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Helen Kwan Yee CheungHelen Kwan Yee Cheung has a B.Soc.Sc. from the University of Hong Kong and an MA from the University of Alberta. She has a diverse background of business, social work, psychology, personnel, and intergovernmental relations, having worked in the provincial and federal public service for twenty-five years. She has curated an exhibition “Painted Faces on the Prairies” for the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library of the University of Alberta in 2014 and currently working on a second project about Chinese merchants in the Canadian West as the Library’s guest curator.
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"Employing a Chinese Ghost Story to Teach the Syncretism of Chinese Religions." Journal of Religion & Film 26, no. 2 (October 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.jrf.26.02.02.
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Upon its release in 1987, the Hong Kong blockbuster A Chinese Ghost Story resulted in sequels, adaptations, and two remakes in 2011 and 2020. Despite its popularity, only a few critics have noticed its eclectic representations of Chinese religions, nor has there been any evaluation of its pedagogical potential. This article details how the author employs this 1987 work to teach the syncretism of Chinese religions in an undergraduate course “Asian Religions in Film.” By decoding the embedded concepts, the meanings and history behind “the Jade Garland talisman,” the inclusion of the Diamond Sutra for exorcistic efficacy, and the portrayal of paper offerings, this article argues that while A Chinese Ghost Story initially seems like a simple horror romance comedy, it nonetheless provides instructors with valuable sources to educate students about the complex and longstanding Chinese culture. Broadly, this article contributes to pedagogy of Asian religions in film by leading students to recognize how this media presents Chinese religious elements to heighten students’ intercultural understanding and awareness of the relationship between humans and spirits in Asian religions. This paper was part of a panel on “Teaching Asian Religions Through Film” presented at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 24–27, 2022. The panel offered concrete examples on how to adopt cinema and TV to discuss Asian religions, culture, and modernity in the classroom and contributed to the developing analysis concerning the use of visual media in Asian studies pedagogy.
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魏, 艷. "《海光文藝》與香港六十年代的流行小説." 人文中國學報, June 1, 2017, 263–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.24112/sinohumanitas.242096.
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LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
本文主要分析香港20世紀六十年代的一本重要左派文藝刊物《海光文藝》中的流行小説。之前對《海光文藝》的研究主要在於它作爲左派的灰色刊物在冷戰時期的意義，本文則對其中的流行小説部分進行細讀，大致分爲兩個部分，第一部分討論《海光文藝》中對流行文學的研究，包括梁羽生、金庸對於武俠小説的討論，盈若思對瓊瑤及郭良蕙的言情小説的分析等。第二部分以文本細讀的方法，分析《海光文藝》刊登的流行短篇小説，特别是選取鄭慧、依達、亦舒這三個分别在五十年代、六十年代及七十年代最爲流行的言情作家作品來討論他們所寫作的言情小説中所反映的不同世代的創作特色。文章認爲《海光文藝》在評論及創作兩個方面均對當時的流行文學研究做出貢獻。它以一種嚴肅的、論文探討式的方式來分析時下的流行文學類型，同時，在創作上，刊物中發表的流行文學在世代、性别、背景上也有多樣化的特點，因此在香港六十年代流行文學的研究及創作上具有重要價值。
This paper discussed the popular fiction in Haiguang wenyi, one of the most important literary journals by the leftist in the 1960s Hong Kong. Previously the studies of this journal mainly focused on its significance as a grey journal of the leftists during the cold war, this paper, however, conducted a detailed analysis in its texts of popular fiction. It consisted two parts. Part one discussed the essays on the theory of popular literature published in this journal, including discussions on martial art fiction by Liang Yusheng and Jing Yong, the analysis by Ying Ruosi on the topic of romances of Qiong Yao and Guo Lianghui. Part two did a detailed readings of the popular fiction in this journal, especially the stories written by Zheng Hui, Yi Da and Yi Shu. These three writers were the most popular romance writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s each. In general, this paper argued that Haiguang wenyi contributed greatly to the popular literature writings in the 1960s Hong Kong literature. Not only did it take a serious attitude to treat popular literature at that time, but also the popular stories published in this journal exhibited the diversity of genres and generations at that time.
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Marshall, P. David. "The Fiction of Public Life." M/C Journal 2, no. 1 (February 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1738.
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One of Woody Allen's first jobs was as a gag/joke writer indirectly for New York gossip columnists. To coordinate with the appearance of famous people at grand openings, Allen would write appropriately witty lines that a star's press agent would work hard to get placed in a newspaper column like Walter Winchell's. The lines would be treated as authentic quotes as the star entered the premiere, club or ceremony (Lax 71). His reputation grew from this ability to see what would be humorous to say in a very public setting, or just generally what would make a particular star look more engaged, more intelligent or more alluring. The presence, at least according to the gossip columnist, was real; what the famous person said was a fiction. If we turn the crystal around somewhat you can see quite a different engagement with the fictional real life. Jackie Chan, possibly the best-known film star, plays a variety of roles from police detective (the Police Story series to his Hollywood Rush Hour) to some saviour of a particular school of kung fu (think of the Dragon Lord series). One of the features of action/kung fu are the fight scenes, elaborately staged stunts of flying bodies and various forms of body blows that have become the base aesthetic of videogames such as Tekken. They have been reformed as a slightly changed aesthetic and with a great deal more pyrotechnics by director John Woo and his series of gun operas, from A Better Tomorrow to the Hollywood-financed Face/Off. The stunts in these various films are appealing in their fetishistic stop in the narrative. For a moment everything is arrested for the movement of bodies. The outcome, although not assured in each battle, is more or less guaranteed in the ultimate survival/triumph of Jackie Chan as hero. Like watching Western professional wrestling the question is always asked: 'was that real?' The melodramatic quality of the films combined with Chan's use of physical humour makes the audience debate the reality of the action sequences. Jackie Chan turns the question around as he resolutely performs all of his "stunts" in his own movies and he reinforces his real through the final trailer in his films as the credits roll, which shows the failed attempts at doing the various stunts where the blood flows and the ambulance occasionally arrives to take Chan away (Chan). Chan is more real in his fictional constructions because there is no blue screen or stunt double hanging from the bus or falling through glass ceilings. One of Chan's laments as he ages is that to ensure his career's longevity he must eventually adopt the "fake" "blue-screen" action style of the Stallones, Willises and Schwarzeneggers of the world. A third angle to view the crystalline refractions of public life is to observe President Clinton in his various representations during his impeachment trial. There are three moving images presented. First, there is the presidential image -- he continues to make speeches (think of the bizarre State of the Union address at the end of January; he presents policy initiatives and meets with international leaders, and we see these moments on the evening news or in stills for the newspaper front pages). Second, there are the medium close-ups edited with close-ups of the president's face, Hilary Clinton's face and their hands: this is the familial Clinton. Third is the washed-out videotaped evidence that Clinton gave to the Grand Jury investigation about his affair with Monica Lewinsky that the trial managers from the House of Representatives are using in the Senate impeachment trial: here is the juridical Clinton which melds the public and the private (think of Monica Lewinsky's testimony: "I saw him more as a man than a President"). Making sense of public life is then not so much about getting to the real or the non-fiction, although that seems to be the will-to-narrative that drives our desire to watch and listen to gossip about the famous. The fictions produced are deployed realities, produced and proliferated for certain functions (Foucault). Woody Allen's unseen efforts are producing the more complete self, where the public arena becomes an elaborate Lacanian mirror stage for an audience. Max Factor's make-up techniques in Hollywood are a similar technology that transforms the self into an image. Jackie Chan's apparently real stunt work has been redeployed into the exigencies of publicity for a Hollywood film; as Redford's Sundance Festival's construction of independent film becomes part of Hollywood's industrial appropriation machine, Jackie Chan willingly becomes part of the revitalisation of Hollywood through the Hong Kong aesthetic. His "real" invigorates the decaying action genre with its extratextual narrative of personal risk. Woody Allen's and Jackie Chan's fictions have been well integrated into the system of representation; after all, as members of the entertainment industry their world is a fictional space that intersects with reality to connect to an audience. Clinton represents something quite transitional and significant in his versions of the self. There are clear deployments of the self put in place by Kenneth Starr and the Congressional Republicans (sounds like a good name for a pop band) that not only place the fictional purity of the President against the backdrop of deceit and adulterated philandering. But there is also the remarkable play of the fictional deployed selves to the audience. This is not the end of the politician's career as we witnessed with Gary Hart's decline or a myriad of other American congressmen who have fallen into the fictions and moralities of a sex scandal. What we are witnessing is the sophisticated reading of the fictional public life by the cognoscenti who just happen to be the entire American populace. Grossberg once wrote in a lament that the right had monopolised what he called the affective economy in the United States. What he meant was that the right was able to mobilise sentiment and, in that way, shape the political and cultural agenda (Grossberg). The Clinton impeachment trial with its three clear versions of the self demonstrates that the overriding fiction of all the representations and the confusion between the real and the fictional production of the self -- something that has been a given in contemporary (we could call it modern) politics -- no longer works. What an audience now looks for is slippage in the fictional plates that reveal something else. The risk is perpetual that the manufactured fiction will not hold and another fiction will supplant it. Refracted, reflected and rerefracted, the fiction of public life has been revealed by its own mechanisms of concealment. Its crystalline structure is solid zirconium which is really quite fine. References Chan, Jackie, with Jeff Yang. I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998. Foucault, Michel, in Rabinow and Dreyfus. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Grossberg, Lawrence. It's a Sin: Politics, Postmodernism and the Popular. Sydney: Power, 1988. Lax, Eric. Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1991. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "The Fiction of Public Life." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "The Fiction of Public Life," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (1999) The fiction of public life. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php> ([your date of access]).
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Weddell-Wedellsborg, Anne. "Inside the Outsider: The Reappearance in Chinese Literature of Long Absent Type of Character." Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 2, no. 1 (May 15, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.22439/cjas.v2i1.1754.
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Of course there are some examples of individuals who crave passionately for a more meaningful existence. But they have to express their inner feelings furtively, out of sight of society. If they admit their beliefs openly, they will simply be seen as "negative examples" by the community. So these people continue to be oppressed.
The above quotation, describing the Chinese outsider, is taken from the Hong Kong intellectual Sun Longji's book, The Deep Structure of Chinese Culture, published in Hong Kong in 1983. This work, together with The Ugly Chinaman by the Taiwanese essayist Bo Yang, has been widely circulating in China, attracting much attention in intellectual and artistic circles.1 Both of them attempt to confront and analyse the negative impact of Chinese culture on its people, and, on that basis, to discuss what it means to be Chinese in the twentieth century.2 They were received in China as highly relevant and provocative contributions to the search for identity, nationally and individually, which has been the main characteristic of the literary scene in recent years. In this article it is intended to take a closer look at this search, through the particular angle of the outsider, as he or she is represented in contemporary fiction. But before giving my definition of an outsider, a few general remarks about the interest in national and individual identity are called for.
The search in literature for national identity has been most conspicuously expressed in the so-called "root-seeking" (xungen) literature, prominent since 1984, which consciously tries to rediscover some traditional Chinese elements, mainly Daoism and Buddhism, but also tribal cultures, primitive myths and folklore.3 This search, as well as being a psychologically understandable response to the tremendous and sudden influx of Western culture and to the whole process of economic modernization, has also been triggered off by the urge to find the roots and causes of the Cultural Revolution. And in fact a sense of the necessity of enquiring into deep-rooted traditional values existed in avant-garde circles well before the large-scale cultural opening of Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg the eighties. The positive approach of the exponents of the recent root-seeking literature, like A Cheng and Han Shaogong, can be said to be complemented by the critical attitude inherent in many stories published in the pioneering unofficial magazine fintian (Today) already in 1978-80. Several stories by writers such as Zhao Zhenkai and Chen Maiping for example, imply a subtle criticism of the traditional virtues of compliance and adjustment.4 The "debate" over national character underlying a significant part of the literature of the post-Mao era is not even something exclusively characteristic of this period. The present debate can in some ways be seen as a continuation of earlier discussions in the fifties and sixties around the type of A Q, though widely divergent in regard to not only concrete issues, but also frame of reference and terms of discourse.5
By contrast, the search in literature for individual identity, as something apart from collective identity, is a new phenomenon particularly belonging to the latest decade, with no real precursors in the previous years of the People's Republic. Looking at the more interesting part of what is in China broadly termed "searching" (tansuoxing de) literature, it is clear that whereas the search for national identity may include or be linked up with a more personal search, there are many examples of literary figures groping to define themselves without even indirectly referring to questions of national identity.
Here I shall present some of these stories which in one way or another touch upon the individual's attempts to understand and cope with the complexities of his or her own existence.6 I shall not attempt any in-depth literary analysis, but rather - as mentioned above - focus on one particular type of fictional character who, after many years of absence, seems to have reentered Chinese literature, and who, by definition, stands apart from the rest: the outsider.