The Intercultxiral Potential Of The ‘Baosi-topic’’.Analysis Of Dong Zhou Lie Guo Zai And Otto Julius Bierbaum’’s Text Das Schone Madchen Von Pau.Ein Chinesischer Roman(1899)

This master’s thesis analyses the original Chinese topic around the figure Baosi with the aim of locating its intercultural potential. Thereby the topic’s intercultural potential is going to be proven by looking at the original Chinese text, the German translation by Carl Arendt as well as at Otto Julius Bierbaum’s novel Das schone Madchen von Pan. Ein chinesischer Roman (1899).The story around the beautiful maiden Baosi who is made responsible for the demise of the Western Zhou Dynasty is derived from the Chinese text Dong zhou lie guo zhi, which dates back to Ming Dynasty. This oeuvre tells the story of the palatinates during the time of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. The first three chapters deal with the respective story.In Intercultural Literary Studies, as a part of Intercultural Germanic Studies, the intercultural potential is seen as an inherent feature of literature, which can be defined as its own ’potential of alterity’and manifests itself first and foremost in the poetic function of literary texts. Intercultural Literary Studies also coined the terms ’poetic alterity’and’cultural alterity’ to describe this characteristic of literature. Both, poetic as well as cultural alterity, can appear in the text’s plot (histoire) as well as in its style (discours) and also in its context.The thesis starts with giving an overview over the Chinese text’s genesis, its reception/ interpretation and its transfer to Europe, then continues with justaxposing the Chinese text and its German translation and concludes with applying the methods intertextuality, interdiscursivity and intermediality on the German primary text Das schone Madchen von Pau. Ein chinesischer Roman. By doing so, the thesis aims at making the topic’s own inherent intercultural potential visible and at visualizing it by taking a closer look at its manifestation in the German treatment of Baosi’s story.Important results of the analysis are that the intercultural potential of Baosi’s story is to be located in the universal themes, the story deals with and which due to their culturally universal claim easily lend themselves to a treatment by authors from different cultures. This is especially evident in Das schone Madchen von Pau. Ein chinesischer Roman, where the intercultural potential in its poetic and cultural alterity shows itself mainly in its intertextual features, which in this case means hypertextuality. Through analyzing the text’s hypertextuality a reinterpretation of the main character Baosi is offered which in turn leads to a reinterpretation of the whole story that runs counter to the Chinese version’s implicit reading. Furthermore the intercultural potential manifests itself-regarding its content as well as its form-in its carnivalesque structures, a term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, which in this case are formally characterized by an approach towards and regarding interpretation by a distance to the Chinese version. Last, through the means of interdiscursivity and intermediality, which refer to discourses of Bierbaum’s era-as defined by Foucault-dealing with the topic of sexuality the text indeed tries to offer an alternative perspective to sexuality, but this alternative may just as well be only a projection on China on account of Bierbaum.