MCLC: Mo Yan and Chinese literary studies essay

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Mo Yan and Chinese literary studies essay
My article “A Dissonance of Discourses: Literary Theory, Ideology, and Translation in Mo Yan and Chinese Literary Studies” has just been published in the current issue of Comparative Literature Studies (vol. 53.1, 2016, pp. 170-197).
I know it’s not common for the MCLC list to announce journal article publications, but since this particular article is about a topic that gained a lot of attention from list members over the years—specifically, the debate around Mo Yan and his Nobel Prize by Anna Sun, Perry Link, and Charles Laughlin—I thought it might be worth announcing.
It’s available for download from Project Muse at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cls/summary/v053/53.1.klein.html
Here’s the abstract:
Mo Yan’s 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature quickly turned into the most controversial international literary prize of recent memory. The controversy took place largely in English, and largely on the American Internet, where as much as Mo Yan was honored as being an important literary voice from a country whose contemporary cultural products are often neglected, he was criticized for supporting the Chinese Communist Party and its government. Defenders have pointed out that the politics in his fiction are neither as simple nor as straightforward as his party membership might otherwise indicate, but critics have said he writes a “daft hilarity” in a “diseased language,” calling his works in translation “superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness.” Taking a detailed look at the controversy and debate, I examine the theoretical assumptions and stakes at work in the reading of Mo Yan and his Nobel, with attention to their ideological underpinnings, followed with a discussion on the importance of considering translation and the relationship between literary reading and politics. I close with a look toward a broadly applicable model of internationalist reading I call translational.
Lucas Klein <lklein at hku.hk>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 6, 2016
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