'A seductive love story set in contemporary Shanghai, The Red Thread intertwines the lives of two pairs of lovers across the centuries. Shen is a young, American-educated appraiser for an auction house. Ruth is a gifted Australian artist he meets, it seems, by chance. And Han is a beautiful, enigmatic woman who both facilitates and complicates their relationship. Yet all three lives mysteriously mirror characters described in a rare, eighteenth-century book that comes up for auction – a book that is missing its final chapters. As the characters in the original tale move toward an ominous, unknown end, Shen’s search for the missing pages goes from curiosity to desperation as he hopes to discover – and perhaps alter – his fated future with Ruth.'
Source: Author's blurb.
'《红线》(The Red Thread,2000)是澳大利亚小说家尼古拉斯·周思(Nicholas Jose)致敬中国文学经典《浮生六记》的一部作品,因其“误读”中国文化而被指责充满了“东方主义话语”.本文以哈罗德·布鲁姆的互文理论为框架,分析《红线》对《浮生六记》的误读和修正过程;讨论跨文化小说的创作技巧、主题意义和跨文化作家的文化立场问题.'
Source: CAOD.
'In 'The Death of the Author', Roland Bathes develops a post-structuralist approach to the issues of reading, writing, and the relationship between texts and the signs that comprise them. Barthes begins the paper with an illustration of the novella Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac, in which a castrato is disguised as a woman, and of whom Balzac writes the following sentence :'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility' (Balzac in Barthes 142). (Introduction)
Framing her reading by Moira Gatens' examination of difference (in Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality) Jaobs explores the three novels, seeing that in each of them, identity, sexual and familial love, and cross-cultural encounters are interrogated and complicated by an inability to forget the past which over-shadows the business of survival. The refutation of history's domination in these texts represents a powerful re-claiming and re-articulation of identity and individual prerogatives, speaking of reasons to live and love, beyond narrowly prescriptive collectivising narratives of time, people or place.
'In 'The Death of the Author', Roland Bathes develops a post-structuralist approach to the issues of reading, writing, and the relationship between texts and the signs that comprise them. Barthes begins the paper with an illustration of the novella Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac, in which a castrato is disguised as a woman, and of whom Balzac writes the following sentence :'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility' (Balzac in Barthes 142). (Introduction)
