Cirrus@Austlit

'This article considers remembrance and forgetting of ‘June Fourth’ (also known as the Tiananmen Square Incident or the Tiananmen Square Massacre) in Australia’s Chinese-language (Sinophone) narratives. Australia’s Sinophone narratives are defined as including those texts created using the Chinese language in Australia as well as the Chinese-language translations of Australian Anglophone narrative texts involving China. The article considers four examples of remembrance and forgetting of June Fourth – each Australian in substance: the 1989 performance of Retrial of a Political Prisoner by Chinese students in Sydney; the novel Oz Tale Sweet and Sour by Leo Xi Rang Liu (Liu Ao), written and first published in Chinese; and Chinese-language translations of two Anglophone texts written by white Australians – Nicholas Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace (translated by Li Yao) and The Hawke Memoirs (translated by a large committee).'

'Nicholas Jose has been advocating “transcultural writing” for more than three decades, with Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989) as an early part of his practice. In 1990, Avenue was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Prize but failed to win this Australian national award. Judged by Chinese semiotician Zhao Yiheng’s reception model of narratives, this is a “message blocked” case. Using the framework of Roman Jakobson’s communication model, this paper reinterprets the six constitutive factors and functions to investigate the elements that blocked the message. My main argument is that “contact”, “context”, and “code” jointly blocked the communication; the three Cs reflect three long-standing problems in Australian literature: the issue of cultural identity, the dark side of White Australian Dream, and the Orientalist representation of “the other” culture. The failure in literary communication analyzed also suggests that Wally’s perception of China follows a Saussurean dichotomy which presupposes a closed linguistic system and excludes the role of the subject and the extra-semiotic object in signification. The Peircean trichotomy better captures the process of concept formation and is a better approach to transcultural writing in the contemporary postmodern situation. Transcultural writing challenges its readers; we need to transcend our confined nationality and persistent prejudice, and develop adequate “transnational literacy” to appreciate this new form of cultural production.'

Source: Abstract.

'Transcultural literary studies as advocated by Italo-Australian critic Arianna Dagnino claims to investigate writers who live transnational lives and write out of a border-crossing and transcendent sensibility. But, in arguing for indeterminacy and fuzziness in transcultural novels, it fails to explain how specifically different cultures should be dealt with in this type of writing. In this essay, [the author draws] on Per Aage Brandt’s cognitive semiotic definition of cultural “sedimentation” as opposed to Raymond Williams’ “analysis of culture” to help with a close reading of two Australian travel novels of the 20th century, i.e. Margaret Jones’ The Confucius Enigma and Nicholas Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace, with special attention to how the two books handle Chinese culture. Such a reading reveals that, while both novels are set in China, the former remains satisfied with minimum cultural representation, and the latter mainly focuses on certain areas of contemporary Chinese culture instead of others. Although Avenue of Eternal Peace does dig beyond the “iconic meanings” of the Chinese culture to reveal authorial knowledge of its “symbolic meanings”, the novel devotes too much of itself to the overwhelmingly “negative semiosis” of China, reflecting a complacent attitude on the part of the protagonist/narrator/author towards Chinese culture. For this reason, neither novel meets Dagnino’s criteria for transcultural writing. And the two novels start us thinking about Dagnino’s theorization of transcultural writing because her emphasis on “transcending” only implies an aloofness and detachment. Brandt’s definition of culture as sedimented symbolic meanings teaches us that genuine transcultural writers should perhaps be prepared not just to know and understand and stay at a distance from other cultures but to engage and heartily share and even partake of their sedimented symbolic meanings at all levels and learn to feel the same way about them as their native members. This is true of the third world diasporic/migrant writers living and writing in the first and second worlds that Dagnino’s theory of transcultural writing remains focused on, but even more of the first and second worlds writing about their transcultural experiences in the third world countries. I argue that part of the intention of Dagnino’s transcultural literary studies is to move beyond postcolonialism’s concern over cultural unevenness and asymmetry, but this study proves that postcolonialism is not and should not be taken as completely over.'

Source: Abstract.

'Avenue of Eternal Peace is an early novel written by Australian novelist Nicholas Jose. Set completely in China, the novel presents a panoramic description of a foreign culture with which the author has been closely associated. In that sense, it is Jose’s first "trans-cultural" novel. Jose claims that the novel represents an attempt on his part as an Australian writer to translate China. Indeed, Avenue of Eternal Peace offers a fascinating translation of Chinese culture. To Jose, cultural translation is different from interlingual translation because it all happens intralingually: it integrates the author’s understanding of the source culture and expression of it in the same process. In so doing Jose shapes his knowledge of a foreign culture through his own language and directly presents it to members of his own culture. This essay first looks into the contents of the Chinese culture in Jose’s translation. Employing what Raymond Williams refers to as the "three levels of culture", namely, the lived culture, the recorded culture and the culture of selective tradition, it then examines Jose’s translation strategies and offers a discussion of the underlying reasons. It concludes that the way in which Jose translates China in his early "trans-cultural" novels betrays a lot of affinities with what Bill Ashcroft calls the "transnational" writing in some postcolonial discourse.

'《长安街》是澳大利亚小说家尼古拉斯·周思早期创作的一部中国题材小说,也是他积极践行的一部"跨文化书写"小说。在这部作品中,周思立足澳大利亚对中国进行了多方位的文化解读。周思把"跨文化书写"看做是一种文化翻译,《长安街》中的文化翻译不同于普通意义上的文字翻译,因为它将作者对中国文化的理解和向西方读者的表达合二为一,努力传达小说家对于中国文化的认识。本文立足澳大利亚理论家比尔·阿希克罗夫特的后殖民文学理论,借用雷蒙德·威廉斯的三级文化分类法,从"亲历文化"、"纪录文化"和"选择性的传统文化"三个方面考察《长安街》对于中国文化的翻译策略、方法和视角,从中观察周思早期中国小说的特点以及这种"跨文化书写"中所反映出的后殖民话语特征'

Source: CAOD.