Chaucer In China: Reception And Field Contestations

This dissertation uses Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theories on habitus,field,and capital to study the reception history of Chaucer in China.It examines how Chaucer reception is influenced and conditioned by the literary and social fields in modern China,analyzes how the habitus of the readers decides their positions in various fields,and investigates how the contestations within and between fields affect China's Chaucer reception.In this reception history of Chaucer,Chinese scholars began with introducing the poet's works and then moved on to close readings of his stories and studying their form,content,meaning,and their cultural and social significances.As both textual and contextual readings,Chaucer reception in recent Chinese history reveals the Chinese scholars' consideration of and participation in the interactions and conflicts of Chinese and western cultures,reflecting their concerns about the reposition of and search for their own cultural identity.Apart from an Introduction and a Conclusion,this dissertation falls into five chapters.The Introduction presents a literature review,a study of both the reception and translation theories,a discussion of Bourdieu's key theoretical concepts,and the basic views and content of this dissertation.Chapter One studies Chaucer reception in the Republican period.The scholars of the New Culture movement and the groups adopting more traditional views are in opposite positions in the social and cultural fields.The scholars of the New Culture movement are in the dominant position in the education,literary,and translation fields.They advocate new literature with its vernacular language and new literary forms,in the hope of promoting new thoughts and building up a new society.Their study emphasizes the importance of Chaucer in defining a new literary epoch,his revolutionizing the English language and the literary form.They choose the stories representing new literary form and idea and use the vernacular to translate them into Chinese.The Xueheng School,on the other hand,with their strong belief in traditional Chinese literary thoughts,especially the Confucian thoughts,does not support a complete westernization of Chinese literature and society.Their study stresses Chaucer's inheritance of his native tradition,using classical Chinese to translate and emphasizing the stories' didactic values.This contestation is a reflection in the social and cultural fields of the confrontation between the new and old cultural thoughts as well as between different social forces.Chapter Two studies China's Chaucer reception from 1949 to 1979.The building up of the new socialist country makes Marxism the most important cultural capital in the social field,and scholars using Marxist theory take the dominant position in the education and literary fields accordingly.Marxist criticism praises Chaucer's sociality and affinity to the people,considering him as a critic of feudalism and highlighting his description of class conflicts and social oppression.Fang Zhong,the well-achieved Chaucer translator,shows his Marxist perspective in his criticism.In the same period,Li Funing's stylistic study is criticized.This situation in Chaucer reception implies field contestations that reflect the power struggle in the political and literary fields at the time.Chapter Three studies Chaucer reception from 1979 to the present.The powerful influence of Western culture coming with the reform and opening-up of China tremendously changes the country's social and political fields in this period and leads to wide scale cultural exchanges and diverse forms of social and cultural development.The contestations in the social field lead to diversified views on Chaucer in the education and literary fields.In general,the scholars' readings of Chaucer are from various perspectives of Chinese cultural tradition,Marxist criticism,and western literary approaches.These diversified approaches lead Chinese Chaucer scholars to,instead of polarized opposition,more mutual respect and mutual learning,which reflects the integration of Chinese and western cultural thoughts in this period.Chapter Four studies Chaucer reception in Hong Kong and Taiwan.The reception histories in these two regions,being always related to the political and cultural situations there,are the results of the influences of literary and social fields and are determined by the critics' habitus as well.Chaucer study is not much in Hong Kong,and it is influenced by the region's unique geographical and cultural positions and is determined by both traditional Chinese culture and the western way of interpretation.Chaucer reception in Taiwan is also a product of the competition between Chinese and western cultures.The early scholars,mostly from the Mainland and very learned of both Chinese and western cultures,study Chaucer in line with both Chinese and western literary thoughts.With the gradual westernization of Taiwan's social and cultural fields,western approaches gradually take the dominant position in Taiwan's Chaucer studies,though they are always engaged in some implicit dialogue with traditional Chinese literary thoughts.Chapter Five studies two major full-text Chinese translations of The Canterbury Tales.Both translations come out in the days when foreign cultures are flooding in.Both are literal renderings,with Fang Zhong's prose translation being concise and elegant in word choice,and Huang Gaoxin's poetic version working on a close resemblance of poetic rhythm and rhyme.They both recreate valuable lieux de mémoire of a once powerful China for Chinese readers,which reflect the efforts of the two translators who try to refashion views on traditional Chinese culture to maintain Chinese national identity and to reconstruct the literary and social fields.This dissertation concludes that literary reception is a social activity.The reception history of Chaucer in China in the recent one hundred years,being closely related to the profound changes of the Chinese society in the period,is actually a social product determined by contestations within and between the social,cultural,and literary fields.