第15期通讯

CASAL Newsletter

No. 15 (1998)

全国美国文学研究会第九届年会通知

由全国美国文学研究会和西安外国语大学联合召开的全国文学研究会第九届年会定于1998年10月9日到13日在西安举行。会议主题为“Modernism and Its Reaction”。会议期间，还将安排“美国文学教学”等专题讨论。来自全国各地的80余名专家、学者将出席本届年会。西安外国语大学将竭诚为这次会议的召开提供良好的服务。10月的西安天高气爽，平均气温为25℃。西安外国语大学全体师生期待着您的光临！古城西安欢迎您的到来！

现将会议具体安排通知如下：

1、  日程：

10月9日（周五）：报到，当晚召开理事会议

10月10日（周六）：年会大会；学术讨论

10月11日（周日）：学术讨论

10月12日（周一）：考察（东线：兵马俑—华清池—半坡；西线：乾陵—茂陵）

10月13日（周二）：离会

2、  食宿：西安外国语大学留学生楼（双人间，每个床位50元）

3、  会费：400元

请于1998年5月30日之前，将回执寄给会议筹备组，以便会务组统计参加会议的人数，收到回执后，筹备组将发出正式会议通知。回执请寄：

210093  南京大学英语系  郭英剑收。

                                        全国美国文学研究会秘书处

CASAL 第九届年会筹备组

1998年4月18日

“中美文化交流：1840-1949”国际学术会议论文摘要选项登

（I）

编者按：1997年7月4日至7日在南京召开了“中美文化交流：1840-1949”国际学术研讨会，会议的详细情况参见CASAL Newsletter第14期刊登的“综述”。从本期起，CASAL Newsletter将陆续刊登此次会议的论文摘要（以作者的姓氏字母为序）。

Missionaries and Chinese Students in the United States

Bu, Liping     West Virginia State College

Chinese Student migration to the United States was initially intertwined with American missionary movement in the 19th century. Missionaries not only set up schools in China but also encouraged young Chinese to come to America for Christian education in the hope that these students, upon completion of studies, would go back to China to assume major Christian leadership. The Mission Boards and YMCA worked with Chinese students to help them form Chinese Students’ Christian Association, which became the national organization for Chinese students in the United States while keeping close ties with student movement and Christian movement in China. In 1911 the YMCA and American churches set forth a unique endeavor to win the hearts of Chinese students and foreign students at large by organizing the Committee on Friendly Relations Among Foreign Students. Various service programs, such as port-of-entry service, personal visits, group meetings, faculty advising, summer conferences, and home hospitality, were develope4d to help Chinese students adjust to American society and to get Americans to meet Chinese in time when Chinese wee terribly discriminated as seen in the treatment of Chinese immigrants. Drawing on primary sources, my paper focused on how American religious groups influenced the social, intellectual, and spiritual life of Chinese students in the United States before 1945.

Some Motivating Forces in the Life of Pearl S. Buck Affecting Her Contributions to Sino-American Relationships

Carter, Frances T. & John T.      Samford University

Some actions of Pearl Buck that may have influenced Sino-American relationships prior to 1949 are examined, with suggestions of forces that might have influenced her in these actions. Her activities that may have contributed to relationships between the two countries include: Personal involvement with the Chinese people while living in China and America; her writings, both fiction and non-fiction in China and America; through lectures and speeches to American audiences on important issues; through direct contacts with American policy makers, most notably, President Franklin Roosevelt; and through foundations and other organizations that raise money for Chinese relief and helped the American people to better understand the Chinese people. Some forces in her life that may have motivated her to action include: a feeling of kinship and identification with the Chinese people; a sense of remorse and implied guilt for the treatment of Chinese and other Asians by people of her race. She stated that she cringed at the arrogance and ignorance of the white man in dealing with Asians and was ashamed that her skin was of the same color. The influence of her Christian philosophy and missionary zeal also motivated her for it tended to give her a sense of responsibility “for people all over the world.” The sympathy she felt for the peasants and working classed Chinese, who she felt, were ignored by the intelligentsia and the rulers. Besides these forces, there were several others such as anger that she felt over the degrading role assigned to women in the world, her concern for the welfare of children, her first-hand experiences with the horrors of war, and her dread of the disastrous conflict that she felt was almost inevitable, the sense of fulfillment and personal satisfaction she felt when people read her writing, and emotional needs in her own life that were often frustrated. Her work on behalf of others provided an outlet and escape from these.

East Wind Visits the West: Pictures of China in American Consciousness

Chauhan, P.S.      Beaver College

Pictures of China, shaped by travelers’ tales, missionaries’ reports, and belletristic texts, have long teased and intrigued the American mind. Thoreau, weaving in Walden (1854), mottoes of Tching-thang, sayings of Confucius, maxims of Mencius, and statements of Thseng-tseu, first sketched for national contemplation a veritable gallery of saintly Chinese philosophers. Contrarily, however, the American naturalists, focusing on immigrant Chinese labor, littered the literary landscape with Chinese caricatures, providing Oriental stereotypes for subsequent popular fiction and Hollywood film.

This paper concentrates upon the narrative strategies of two Chinese-American authors — Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan — who have not only corrected the distortions of the naturalists, but also fashioned a new narrative, one that offers a rich tapestry of Chinese talk — stories, legends, and myths, confronting the reader with provocative icons. The reconstructed image of China, as it emerges from their fictions of 1920s and 1940s, is of a society vital, varied, and enduring, of a people resourceful enough to handle and crisis and sane enough to come to terms with the inevitable human condition. Their narrative devices, vying with Naipaul and Rushdie’s techniques, have, at the same time, won a respect for Asian-American fictions in English.

Pearl S. Buck and Chinese —American Cultural Interaction

Conn, Peter      University of Pennsylvania

Based in part on my recent book, Pearl S. Buck: A cultural Biography, this paper will examine Pearl Buck’s role in Chinese-American cultural relations. The paper begins with a brief survey of Buck’s life, which provides the sources for her information and her opinions about both the United States and China. Next, a review of late-nineteenth-century American attitudes toward China offers the context within which Buck’s distinctive viewpoint can be assessed. The longest section of the paper attempts a fairly detailed analysis of several of her stories and essays — with an emphasis on her writing in the 1930s and 1940s — together with a summary of her political activities.

Pearl Buck was, according to historian James Thomson, the most influential Westerner to write about China since Marco Polo; and sociologist Harold Isaacs determined that The Good Earth did more to shape America’s image of China than any other book. The task of my paper is to investigate the biographical and literary details of her contribution to the long history of cultural interaction between China and the United States.

Where Is the East: Asian Objects in American Museums, 1876-1926

Conn, Steven      The Ohio State University

The fifty years between 1876 and 1926 represents the period a great museum building. Most of the major museums which dot the American cultural landscape were either founded, or significantly expanded during those years.

This physical construction accompanied, reflected and helped to shape the creation and redefinition of bodies of knowledge. The museums of this era attempted to display those intellectual categories, and through displays to define differences between them.

In an age of considerable shifting of intellectual disciplines, museums tried to answer questions like: what is the difference between anthropology and natural history? What constitutes the field of “fine art?” What objects represent history? And what objects represent “culture?” Not only did museums struggle to answer these questions, but they also put their answers on display for the public. Among the most complicated questions some museums tried to solve was where they should put Asian objects. On the one hand, these objects were produced by peoples regarded in the West as exotic, backward and inferior. As such these objects might properly belong in anthropological collections. On the other hand, many collectors and museologists recognized the extraordinary aesthetic achievement embodied in these objects, and the long history of civilization they represented.

For these Americans, Asian objects deserved a place alongside other “fine are” objects.

My paper will examine how this question was debated and resolved in several American museums.

Xingzhi Tao and John Dewey: Sino-American Interaction in Education

Du, Ruiqing      Xi’an Foreign Language University

In its educational development, China borrowed extensively from other countries, but no borrowing was as pervasive and noteworthy as its adaptation of the American practice during the first half of the present century. Most instrumental in this adaptation endeavor is Xingzhi Tao (1891- 1946) who studied in the USA and returned as an ardent advocate and practitioner of the ideas and 3experiments that were prevalent in America.

Tao’s mentor, John Dewey (1859-1952), the most influential and American of all American educators at the time, left an unmatched imprint on Chinese education through the dissemination of his ideas by many of his former Chinese students and as a result of his extended lecture tour in China between 1919 and 1921. This educational interaction between the two cultures is particularly significant in that Tao learned from, but more importantly, went far beyond Dewey, which is largely attributable to Tao’s acculturation to the West and enculturation to China. The interaction in education between Tao and Dewey and the former’s adaptation, modification and overhaul of the latter’s ideas and practices may well serve as an example for China in its opening-up initiatives and modernization drive over recent years.

China as Portrayed in the Missionary Periodical

“Maryknoll-Field Afar” from 1907 through 1949

Erat, Kathryn     University of Massachusetts

Field AfarMaryknoll was founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1907. The founding of Field Afar was shortly accompanied by the founding of the Catholic Foreign Missionary Society of America (commonly known as Maryknoll) which maintained missions in both north and south China from 1918 to 1950. From 1907 on, a quarter of each issue of Field Afar was devoted to China. The writing focused on anecdotes and accomplishments of mission life,, the physical, social, and civil conditions of China and commentary on Chinese culture and philosophy. A time-line reading of Field Afar traces eye-witnesses’ accounts of what these American Catholic missionaries (and others) experienced, perceived and did in China in response to their own religious imperatives, the Chinese they encountered, and the exigencies of the situations in which they found themselves. It therefore traces what their contemporary American readers were learning about China from reading their reports. This paper will focus on selected years from 1907 to 1949 in reporting this time-line of events and development. It will also describe Field Afar’s and Maryknoll’s founding and categories of writing. It will draw conclusions on the collective development of Catholic missionaries’ insights into the situation of China and their response to China’s varied situations insofar as this can be deduced from Field Afar exclusively.

Pearl S. Buck and Post-colonialism

Guo, Yingjian     Nanjing University

Pearl Buck is a person who combines two different cultures and values of China and USA, but belongs to neither of them. She often describes her unique Chinese-American background as one, which offered her the ability to be “mentally bifocal” — that is, she was able to look at two distinctly different cultures and understand and love both of them each on its own terms. She was accepted socially and literally by neither of them. Consciousness of cultural conflict is a major theme in Pearl Buck’s works, but a great ocean and a great cultural gap separate the U.S. from Asia, so American readers have the tendency to view her works about China as sociological or anthropological documents rather than as literary ones. Meanwhile, most of the Chinese translators and critics before 1949 and especially after 1949 were not grateful to Pearl Buck for her great writings about China. During the Cold War period, Pearl Buck was regarded as an anti-Communist and she was severely attacked by Chinese critics as a pioneer of American imperialist cultural aggression.

This paper intends to demonstrate the connections between Buck’s writing and post-colonial theories of Edward Said. It argues that Buck’s successive writings could and should be read “anti-imperialism” and “anti-Orientalism”. Pearl S. Buck clearly distinguished her writings from those of “Orientalism” in the past and modern mainstream culture in the West. The purpose of her true description of China, and other Asian countries, is to expose the falseness of grand-narrative of the West about China, so as to mix the East and China together with the Western world. Edward Said’s theories show that the hegemonic trails are clearly discovered in modern Western mainstream culture. However, there is no lack of anti-hegemonism or anti-imperialism in Pearl Buck’s works. There are many similarities between her novels and those of today’s writers who are regarded as post-colonialist writers. By comparison and analysis, we might argue that it is appropriate to regard Peal Buck as one of the forerunners of the post-colonialist writers.

Pearl S. Buck’s Perspective in Comparing Chinese and American Cultures

Guo, Young jiang        Yao, Xipei

China Association of TV Artists Luxun Institute

Through the trilogy of The Good Earth Pearl Buck, people of America and even the world began to know, understand and be concerned about and have friendship with China. Illustrated in the books are Pearl Buck’s sound understanding and objective comparison of the differences between China and the West concerning history, politics, culture, art, education, religion, customs and revolutions. Meanwhile, Pearl Buck created her images through her special perspective so that the readers (especially those in the powerful countries in Europe and America) could reasonably look at the Chinese characters in the books and therefore, understand them.

Pearl Buck’s comparison of Chinese and American civilizations was reflected not only in her novels but also in her biographies and essays. Obviously, it is worth reexamining Pearl Buck’s special perspective in comparing the Chinese and American civilizations. Through this reexamination, we perhaps could understand the conflicts between the two countries.

LinYutang’s Cultural Attitude as Seen in His View of Women

Jiang, Daochao      Nanjing University

Born and brought up in a Chinese environment but trained in a Western way, Lin Yutang was destined to shoulder the responsibility of acting as a cultural bridge between the USA in the West and China in the East, so that both of them could understand each other and incorporate ideas for their own benefits. However, in doing so, Lin Yutang did not accept the ideas of each country without his own judgment , but was quite tendentious. His cultural attitude can be discerned from his view of women who prove to be a major concern all through his life.

Different from the conservative, who repudiated the democracy meted out to women, and the radicals who welcomed everything from the West including the nude pictures of women, the equality between men and women etc. at that time, Lin Yutang took the “Golden Mean”, absorbing from both cultures ideas which exhibited universal love, mercy and generosity, abandoning those which were ruthless and undemocratic. Specifically speaking, he took the ideas from Christianity in the West and Confucius and Taoism in China. For Lin Yutang, men and women were born to be equal in terms of dignity and nature, though physically and psychologically, they were certainly different. Men’s duty was to earn money and women’s to bear and rear children, and take care of their exhausted husbands at home. So the happiest event in a woman’s life is to get married because only in this way could they find the “rice bowl”, avoid being starved, and enjoy equality with their husbands.

Reflected in this view is Lin Yutang’s cultural attitude. Lin Yutang was obscure for quite a number of years, for he was accused of being hostile to his country, and therefore, sharply attacked. His masterpiece My Country and My People, published in the United States in 1936, was even regarded as one which “sold his country and his people” (according to the same pronunciation of the English as the Chinese.). Actually, a careful perusal and a closer examination of his major works reveals such a judgment unfair.

O-lan and Land — The Mother Earth in The Good Earth

Jiang, Haoyun      Nanjing University

Among all the works of Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth exhibits a significance, which almost prejudices the possible success of later ones. Its heroine, O-lan, not only represents millions of common Chinese country wives, but also presents a living image of the Mother Earth archetype, the primitive goddess in charge of the fertility of both land and women. Since different cultures present their own portraits of their Mother Earth, in spite of Her universality, the calm, enduring and homely one shown by O-lan is authentic Chinese, as compared with western ones, who always bear a dark, frightening aspect.

It is the resultant forces of Chinese culture and some special experience of the writer that gift O-lan with the Chinese Mother Earth image. The four-thousand-year agricultural tradition of China has fixed the notion about the Mother Earth in rites, myths, and even philosophical writings. The archetypal image, which used to be part of the collective unconsciousness, is therefore transformed into some passable codes woven in the culture which Pearl Buck grew up with. During the years when she prepared herself for the novel her special concerns for land and maternity made it possible for the combination of the two — the Mother Earth archetype — to appear in the text. Compared with Chinese literary works in that period, The Good Earth deserves special credit for its outstanding image of a Chinese Mother Earth.

American Missionary Doctors and the Rise of Western Medicine in Guangzhou

Liang, Biying      Zhongshan University

At the beginning of the 19th century, Western Protestant missionaries came to Guangzhou. Among various auxiliary ways for preaching Christianity, medical missionary turned out to be the most effective. American missionary doctors became the major force in promoting modern Guangzhou’s Western medical development. From then on, Guangzhou began to play a leading role in medicine.

In 1835, the establishment of the Ophthalmic Hospital by Peter Parker, the first American missionary to China, marked the spread of Western medicine in Guangzhou. Later, the hospital developed into a comprehensive one and succeeded in performing several complex operations. Parker’s hospital and its medical activities helped the spreading of Western medicine in China. Another example was the Medical Missionary Society in China, established in 1838.

Since the Second Opium War, the spread of Western medicine was extended to other coastal cities, but Guangzhou remained to be the center. Boji Hospital developed from Parker’s Ophthalmic Hospital achieved the nationwide fame. John Glasgow Ker, one of its presidents made great contributions to the eastward spreading of Western medicine. The spread of Western medicine in China started from Guangzhou, and was promoted by the establishment of Western medical hospitals, among which Boji Hospital served as the best example and hence earned the fame “the origin of new medicine in China”. American missionaries, as well as those from other countries, introduced advanced medical theories, techniques and educational ideas and systems to China while training a number of Chinese doctors. The introduction of Western medicine also broadened the field of Chinese medicine. With the establishment of Chinese Medical Missionary Association in 1886, the spread of Western medicine became professional and scientific.

From Beyond the Horizon to The Good Earth

— Transformation of China in American Literary Consciousness

Liu, Haiping           Nanjing University

Eugene O’Neill and Pearl S. Buck, the two American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936 and 1938 respectively, are both known for their interest in and influence by Chinese culture. Their works represent two monuments in the history of Chinese-American cultural interaction.

In 1928, O’Neill in his early forties sailed across the Atlantic and the Indian to China to “absorb a bit of background” for his “future work.” Before that, when gathering back-ground materials for his plays, he read extensively o Chinese history, religion, art and poetry. And he persisted in thoughtful reading on China till 1934. With the money from the Nobel Prize in 1936, he built a Chinese-styled house, facing the Pacific, in the mountains in California and named it “Tao House”. There, he was to live like a Taoist hermit and write his last and best dramas permeated with Taoist ideas. O’Neill’s plays represent a continuing effort by American dramatists to depict China and the Chinese. And his Orientalism is “the most important and distinctive aspect of his art.”

Due to the constant pull of western philosophical and dramatic traditions in his religious upbringing and literary sources, O’Neill’s journey to China was complex and non-lineal. The word China, or Cathay, appears in many of his plays. As O’Neill developed as a dramatist, the image of China changes in his plays from a vague and unidentifiable place far away beyond the horizon, to a romanticized heaven for the escapist, and to an Orientalized land from which to launch satirical attacks on the materialistic America.

Unlike O’Neill’s, Pearl S. Buck’s passage to China was not of her own choice. She was brought to China by her missionary parents when only 3 months old. There she spent virtually the first half of her eighty years of life. Brought up in a bi-lingual environment, she was conversant with both Chinese and English. Unlike O’Neill, she did not get to know China through books, though being steep in Chinese literary classics. She knew China as her actual, day-to-day world. She was nourished by both Chinese and American cultures, but also smarted form their clashes. She lived among the Chinese as a minority member, and experience that contributed greatly to her lifelong passion for interracial understanding. Pearl Buck depicted the Chinese peasants in her novels as part of her search for reality, as she believed “they were the most real, the closest to the earth.” Whereas O’Neill picked Taoism from the Chinese treasure house for his own need, Pearl Buck was embraced by Chinese culture from all sides, and in all its kinds and shades. O’Neill turned to Chinese philosophy to satisfy his spiritual yearnings after the God in whom he was brought to believe was declared dead. Pearl Buck wrote her Chinese novels to help Americans understand China as it was. For the first time in Western literary history, the Chinese were realistically portrayed in the relationship not with the Westerners, but with themselves.

The Ideal Personality of Shi and the Confucian Cultural Attitude:

Pearl S. Buck’s View of Traditional Chinese Culture

Liu, Long     Zhenjiang Teachers’ School

Chinese culture mainly consists of Confucianism, Imperial Examination System and Feudal Ethic, which were fully shown in Pearl Buck’s cultural view. Observing the tenets of the ideal personality of Shi, and transcending her personal and national view and trying to be impersonal, she was typically a Chinese “Shi”. She greatly appreciated the universal ethics, pursued the harmony between people, and regarded the moral personality as the highest ideal of men. She could not bear anything that was immoral. However, the conflict between her ideal and the reality made her feel prejudiced against and therefore, was, from time to time, troubled by misgivings.

Her transcending was shown in her respect for cultures of other countries, in her critical reception of her own country and in her approval of a multiculturalism now popular in recent years, which encourages the co-existence of different cultures and the friendly exchange of them, objects to any violence, subversion and chauvinism.

Impact of American Culture upon the Chinese: 1911-1927

Pan, Shaozhong     Beijing Foreign Affairs College

The 1911 Revolution of China, which occurred almost as an accident, is often underrated in Chinese historiography, especially in its socio-cultural significance, as no essential social or cultural change took place in China except for the replacement of a minority dynasty by a chaotic war-torn society apparently falling apart amidst the incessant conflicts of domestic warlords and wire-pulling foreign powers. However, just by dealing the death-blow to the last dynasty in China, which had long outlived its historic raison d’etre and stubbornly held a centralized, ossified regime together, the Revolution broke the inertial of dynastic cycles of Chinese history and opened wide the “floodgate” for new ideas and new vigor that had been accumulating or brewing among the Chinese. A flowering and competing of various schools of thought was to burst forth, as never before since the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589) or indeed since the famous Spring and Autumn, and Warring States Periods (770-221 BC).

During this crucial period (1911-1927), the influence of American culture, which had been gathering force through missionary schools and students (especially since the use of Boxer Indemnities), translations, and aid to Dr. Sun Yatsen, , gr, ew, rapidly in China. Its leading exponen, t Hu Shi (1891- 1962) played a prominent role in the New Culture Movement (1915-1921), with many other leaders of the Movement favorably inclined, even after the First World War (1914-1918) disillusioned Chinese intellectuals with hitherto-leading Western powers. With the outbreak of the Russian October Revolution (1917) and the May Fourth Movement (1919) in China, the mood of the Chinese intelligentsia was radicalized, ad a viable alternative, i.e. the non-capitalist, non-“Western” choice of communism, present itself with the formation of the C.C.P, in 1921. The split between the pro-American and pro-Soviet allies had first surfaced in the Debate on Isms and Problems (July 1919), continued through John Dewey’s lecturing visits (the first of which occurred in 1919-1921), and was temporarily submerged under the wider and seemingly auspicious KMT-CCP alliance (1924-1927).

With the split between KMT and CCP in 1927 and the unification (nominal and substantial) of China under Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), ended the latest period of “a hundred contending schools” in China. Though American influence, cultural and otherwise, seemed to grow on a scale never attained before, it was tied to Chiang’s regime and Chinese conservatism, and doomed to banishment with them, until a new relationship was forged with China for American-Chinese cultural interaction to enter a new era.

Chinese-American Writers of Post World War II Celebrate Their Two Cultures: Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Henry David Hwang

Ranald, Margaret Loftus       The City University of New York

I have chosen to treat the newest group of Chinese American writers and their approaches to their own biculturalism. They are currently writing, beginning in 1976, beyond the temporal parameters of this conference. However, they develop from and look back upon their personal past, their interrelationships with their Chinese heritage, as passed on to them through their parents, particularly their mothers (for the women). These three writers are all Californians, educated at the University of California, Berkeley, San Jose State University, and Stanford University, in or just after the time of anti-Vietnam War unrest on campus, which brought many people to discovery  that America is indeed a multicultural democracy.

Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior combines myth and autobiography, in her history of her mother Brave Orchid, and her own career. Then in China Men she recalls the ill treatment meted out to those who came to seek their fortune on Gold Mountain, a phrase that recalls the Irish-American attitude that “The streets were paved with gold.” On arrival they met with discrimination in mining camps and as “gaudy dancers,” a slang for railroad workers or laborers. This rather contemptuous view of such men, forbidden to bring their women with them, was celebrated in the poems of Bret Harte, where they became figures of fun. Amy Tan, particularly in The Joy Luck Club, alternates the autobiographies of mothers and daughters, showing the ways in which they interact, conflict, and enrich each other’s lives. The strength of Chinese culture remains, and in their modes of contemporary living the daughters must effect a synthesis. Her later works continue this approach. David Henry Hwang, the only man in this group and also the only dramatist, concerns himself almost entirely with multiculturalism in his play Fob. This shows the conflict between the attitudes of an FOB “Fresh off the Boat” immigrant from China and American-born Chinese. Significantly, the play takes place in Westwood CA, the home of the university of California, Los Angeles. Fob was developed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center at Waterford, Connecticut. His Trying to Find Chinatown is concerned with an Asian-American adopted by white people coming to terms with his past. In Bondage, the action takes place in a dado-masochistic parlor in Los Angeles, where the Dominatrix and her male client play games of power as they shift into differing cultural roles that represent racial stereotypes. However, his most famous play remains M. Butterfly, based on an actual case in which a French diplomat has an affair with a Peking Opera Diva — who, as we all know, is a man. I still recall the stunning impact on me and my daughter of Gallimard’s brilliant defining lines “I’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. Everything else simply falls short.”

This paper attempts to discuss the attempts of these three authors to recover their past and come to terms with the present by bringing their audience to see America through their eyes.

·会议信息·

纪念福克纳百年诞辰  交流东西方研究成果

——北京召开国际福克纳研讨会

为纪念福克纳诞辰一百周年，北京大学英语系、香港浸会大学英语系、香港中文大学港美中心在著名福克纳专家陶洁教授的召集下联合于1997年11月1日至4日在北京举办了国内首届国际福克纳研讨会。来自美国、日本、香港特区、中国大陆等国家和地区的四十多位代表出席了会议，就福克纳与美国南方文化、福克纳的成就与影响、阅读与讲授福克纳的方法等议题进行了热烈而深入的讨论，交流了东、西方福克纳研究的最新成果。

福克纳与南方的关系是大学讨论较多的问题。陶洁的《在南方成长：评福克纳的〈坟墓的闯入者〉》、乔伊纳的《“真实与虚构”：福克纳与南方历史的悲剧》、多萝茜∙黄的《文学与社会：论〈喧嚣与骚动〉中的自我和社会关系》、迈克尔∙耶特曼的《福克纳与美国内战：〈八月之光〉中的盖尔•海塔瓦与历史的囚禁》、威廉∙莫斯的《“他在谈论一位姑娘…他不得不谈点儿什么”：威廉∙福克纳论文学的题材与对象》、朵萝茜∙斯库拉的《福克纳、伊夫林、斯科特和“场景不同的‘雷同之书’”》、远山清子的《关于和平的伟大寓言：福克纳笔下的战争与和平》、胡铁生的《福克纳小说的根源》、刘建华的《〈押沙龙，押沙龙！〉中的复仇与对话》等论文从不同侧面讨论了福克纳与南方的传统观念，森严的等级制度，复杂的种族、阶级和性别矛盾，美国内战，内战后的破败现实，怀旧情结，文学传统，第一次世界大战后的反思运动等社会历史现象之间的关系。

福克纳的成就与影响也是这次研讨会的一个重要话题。吴冰的《〈士兵的报酬〉：福克纳的伟大文学生涯的开端》、姚乃强的《福克纳的〈士兵的报酬〉：南方人的罗曼司与现代战争》、郭雅利的《独具慧眼的作家：谈〈喧嚣与骚动〉与〈押沙龙，押沙龙！〉中的细节》、托马斯∙英奇的《“南方铁路公司的火车”：作家们论福克纳及其影响》、朱世达的《福克纳与莫言》、肖明翰的《〈押沙龙，押沙龙！〉中的历史与主体性》、胡泓的《一切乃他者之镜：福克纳小说的意蕴》、刘荐波的《〈喧嚣与骚动〉中的复调》和魏玉杰的《威廉∙福克纳：解构与重构》等论文多角度地探讨了福克纳在思想上和艺术上的巨大成就和深远影响。

关于阅读与讲授福克纳的方法，与会代表也介绍了不少颇具启发性的尝试与体会。杨素英的《〈去吧，摩西〉的动词形式与叙事效果》、陈凯的《福克纳短篇小说〈熊〉的文体分析》、刘美文的《不在墓中的尸体的言说：艾迪·本德伦、话语和女性主体》、黄佩玲的《心灵的图画：〈两圆妻〉、〈在家的艺术家〉、〈沙漠里的牧歌〉对城市和女性的描写》、艾琳娜·波特的《福克纳与美国自然传统》、曹莉的《解读福克纳的〈干燥的九月〉的几种方法》、金莉的《大屋里的疯女人：读福克纳的〈献给艾米丽的玫瑰〉》等论文运用话语分析、女权主义批评、精神分析、生态批评、解构主义、社会-历史批评等理论，展示了福克纳的作品的丰富内涵以及进行教学实践的多重可能。

虽然我国在三十年代就有人介绍福克纳，但对他的翻译与研究主要是在七十年代后期开展起来的。由于起步晚、资料少，我国在这方面研究的总体水平离国际水平还有相当的差距。所以，为我国的福克纳翻译与研究做出重要贡献的李文俊先生在致研讨会的贺词《祝贺与呼吁》中热切希望能有高水平的年轻译者投身这项事业，争取在十年左右将福克纳的大部分作品译介给华文读者，大力推进我国的福克纳研究。

                                                             （刘建华）

·会员信息·

华西医科大学外语系文楚安教授目前在美国哈佛大学英语系作访问学者，他是受国家教委留学基金的资助到美国进行研究工作的。文教授近年来的研究重点为Beat Literature，他在这方面已出版了不少专著与译著。1997年10月3日至5日，在美国的University of Massachusetts召开了一次有关Beat Literature研讨会，文教授在会上作了题为Beat Literature in China的发言，引起了与会专家学者的极大兴趣。为此，当地的报纸The Lowell Pispatch News 专门采访了文教授，并将采访的内容在报纸上发表。之后，文教授又应邀到University of Massachusetts与Middlesex College作了有关Beat Literature的报告。

                                                            （天  行）