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- Li, Shuangyi, et al.
(author)
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(Sino)graphs in Franco(n)texts : The multilingual and the multimodal in Franco-Chinese literature and visual arts
- 2021. - 1
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In: Multilingual Literature as World Literature. - 9781501360091 ; 1, s. 27-50
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter examines the aesthetic of the sinograph in the French-language novels, calligraphic works, and picture books by two first-generation Chinese migrant writers and artists in France, François Cheng and Shan Sa. It begins with an illustration of Cheng's and Shan's 'Chinese' calligraphic works (accompanied by the artists' French texts) (Et le Souffle devient signe: Portrait d’une âme à l’encre de Chine [2001] & Le Mirroir d’un calligraphe [2002]), and explicate their artistic sensibilities and visions informed by traditional Chinese aesthetic concepts, e.g. yin-yang, mountain-water, sentiment-scenery. These calligraphic images are then 'read' into their respective French novelistic fabric (Le Dit de Tianyi [1998] & L’Impératrice [2003]). Our knowledge of the sinograph is key to the revelation of these writers' transcultural stylistic innovations and diegetic configurations, a kind of (in)visible multilingualism and multimodality beyond the obvious linguistic translation and lexical borrowing. Franco-Chinese writers and artists have a rather complex and sometimes paradoxical attitudes and relations to the Chinese script, especially facing a primarily francophone audience. Yet, I will argue that this conscious visual poeticization of/through the sinograph in the French language is still a defining aesthetic of Franco-Chinese literature and visual arts. While problematizing the notion of 'Chineseness' that is seemingly essentialized by the sinograph in diasporic Chinese literature and visual arts, I will also draw on the theories of ‘imagetext’ (Mitchell 1994) and ‘the translational’ (Tong King Lee 2013) to investigate the multilingual and multimodal aspects of cultural translation in the critical framework of World Literature.
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| 2. |
- Li, Shuangyi, et al.
(author)
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Transcending Exoticism? Sound and Voice in Dai Sijie and François Cheng
- 2021
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In: Sounds Senses. - 9781800856882 ; 12
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Francophone Chinese writers Dai Sijie and François Cheng are both first-generation migrants in France, whose French-language literary works have received the highest French institutional recognitions (from the Prix Femina to the Grand Prix de la francophonie de l'Académie française). Existing scholarship on the impact of their native Chinese language on these writers' French texts focuses almost exclusively on the visual aspects. Different from such oculocentric approaches, this chapter conceptualizes Franco-Chinese literature as exophone ("exotic sounding") writing and scrutinizes the auditory aesthetic in the two writers' different literary engagements with sound and voice. With access to both the sound and the image of Chinese and French, Dai and Cheng are seen not only to play with Western fantasy, but also to rework and reconfigure, cross-culturally, the dynamic relationship between phone and graph in their literary works, especially in relation to exoticism. Indeed, it is ultimately through sound and voice that both writers attempt to think beyond Chinese-French binary tensions and reflect more synthetically on literary and human experiences of language that are universal and at the same highly individual.
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