A Contrastive Study On The Aesthetic Representation On Chinese Versions Of Gulliver’s Travels From The Perspective Of Defamiliarization Theory

“Defamiliarization”,as a literary theory,was put forward by Viktor Shklovskij,a Russian formalist critic,in his article: Art as a Technique at the beginning of the 20 th century.Its purpose is to dispel people’s habitual associations of things or break up the concept of "seeing nature as natural" formed in social culture,so as to make the aesthetic subject’s perception of daily life or its automatic habits a counter-effect,thus prolonging the time and difficulty of aesthetic subject’s attention span and feeling,and inducing the aesthetic subject to increase aesthetic pleasure in the imaginary space,and finally,to achieve the effect of second understanding and experience of this life.The branches of art are all-encompassing.The study of aesthetic art is an indispensable part of it,the aesthetic emotion of the subject constantly constructs his attitude towards life,and the occurrence of artistic feelings is the purpose of artistic creation.Beauty is everywhere,it can be said that the process of aesthetic is also the process of creating artistic ideas.Like artistic creation,literary translation is also a kind of aesthetic reproduction.After overcoming the barriers of language symbols,the target reader can probe deeper into the original text’s artistic world,experience the correspondent aesthetic taste brought by foreign cultures,feel different cultural pleasures and spiritual enjoyment and appreciate the "pearl" of foreign cultures.Under the proper guidance of Defamiliarization Theory,literary translations can best retain "heterogeneity" elements in the original text so as to stimulate readers’ strong interest in reading the rendered text,prolong their reading attention span,increase their intense aesthetic pleasure,and enable them to appreciate its eternal artistic value.Gulliver’s Travels,the study text of this thesis,is one of the outstanding satirical novels in the history of world literature.The novel’s concise and bright language,witty and humorous satirical effect endow the novel with special aesthetic value and significance.This thesis selects Zhang Jian’s and Sun Yu’s Chinese translations of Gulliver’s Travels as the research texts.Guided by Defamiliarization Theory,this thesis focuses on the literary aesthetic representation of the book.Firstly,it starts with the historical evolution of Defamiliarization Theory,briefly reviews the research results of Gulliver’s Travels at home and abroad,and elaborates the delicate relationship between Defamiliarization Theory and literary translation to demonstrate the significance and value of aesthetic theory in literary translations.Meanwhile,it compares the aesthetic representation of “Defamiliarization” in the two versions by Zhang Jian and Sun Yu of Gulliver’s travels from the diverse perspectives of language and culture.The thesis explores ways to highlight the “strangeness ”of the aesthetic object in artistic creation and the aesthetic gaze between the appraiser and artistic work,and reflects on the translator’s proper control of the aesthetic distance in translation activities by means of adjusting the “appropriate distance” from the aesthetic subject to the object’s emotional transfer.