Intertextuality And Reflection On Communication In Ted Chiang’s Sci-Fi Stories

Ted Chiang(1967-)is a rising star in the Chinese American sci-fi field.His sci-fi stories have swept many sci-fi awards including four Hugo Awards,four Nebula Awards,four Locus Awards,to name only a few.His short sci-fi stories are considered as thought experiments involving multiple subjects such as linguistics,religion,etc.Besides,a noteworthy phenomenon is that a wide variety of intertextual relationships could be identified in many of his works.Hence,this thesis studies the intertextuality in Chiang’s short stories based on Gérard Genette’s transtextuality theory which divides the transtextual relationship into five categories:intertextuality(in narrow sense),paratextuality,metatextuality,hypertextuality and architextuality.Through the theoretical lens,hypertextuality in “Tower of Babylon” and“Division by Zero”,metatextuality in “Story of Your Life” and paratextuality in “Liking What You See: A Documentary” are analyzed.Based on the textual analysis,the thesis illustrates different states of human communication in Chiang’s writing: loss of communication,recovery of communication and ideal communication respectively through various categories of transtextuality.Problematizing the loss of communication,Chiang’s writing envisages the recovery of communication and the construction of an ideal form of communication,operated on different transtextual relationships,to better engage contemporary issues with the concern over and reflection on human communication to readers.