Appropriating the Euro-American Canon in Contemporary East Asia

我的博士论文将探讨当代改编和挪用希腊罗马古代和维多利亚时代的作者在中国，日本和韩国，在一系列印刷，视觉和数字媒体。至少从19世纪开始，东亚文化生产与欧美文学经典之间的关系就以殖民主义和帝国主义为标志，但我认为，最近的跨文化适应的例子已经开始超越“殖民认同的界限……或]后殖民政治的怨恨”（Chen 2010），与它们的源文本和语境建立相互启发的对话。我之所以选择集中讨论古典希腊、罗马和维多利亚时代的英国，是因为它们不仅在东亚，而且在其他文化遥远的地区，在叙事媒体的生产和消费方面，历史和当前都很突出。任何涉及欧美文学经典改编的项目都不能忽视改编研究的子领域，我的研究也不例外。虽然改编研究仍然“以20世纪的英语文学和电影为主导”（Elliott 2020），但它已经逐渐将其研究范围扩大到其他语言、媒体和时期。然而，希腊罗马古代的接受仍然是一个独特的研究领域，超出了大多数适应学者的范围，该领域的绝大多数研究都是由经典接受研究的平行子领域进行的。这两个子领域的发展或多或少是相互孤立的，尽管它们对宣布和显示与先前来源的扩展接触的文本有着相似的关注。造成这种奇怪现象的部分原因可以归结为现代学术中古典文学研究和文学研究之间的学科分歧，但也可以归结为最近的理论分歧。然而，我认为，这些差异不公正地掩盖了更大的跨学科对话的潜力。因此，我的项目旨在展示统一每个子领域的原则和方法的效用，特别是在检查东亚背景下的跨文化适应方面。古典文学的接受和改编研究相对较少关注欧美文本在东亚是如何被接受和重新利用的。考虑到这些传统上以欧洲为中心的领域对于“阅读”东亚跨文化适应的任务是多么的缺乏装备，我研究的第二个主要目标将是调查他们的关键习语如何在没有殖民主义或帝国主义干预影响的情况下有效地部署。在这方面，我将以陈冠星在《亚洲作为方法》（2010）一书中提出的分析框架为指导，以避免我自己陷入被动后殖民批判的陷阱。通过选择关注欧美经典在中国、日本和韩国的接受，我希望解决当前超越地理范畴的学术研究的不足。虽然古典接受和改编学者现在在各自的学科领域内对后殖民写作投入了大量的批判性关注（如Hardwick 2007， Hutcheon 2006和Ponzanesi 2014），但他们尚未阐明一个独特的理论立场，从这个理论立场来研究从未被西方列强完全殖民，但仍然受制于不同程度的殖民和帝国主义霸权的领土上产生的文本。东亚是半殖民地条件下的杰出案例研究，探索该地区跨文化适应的变迁将使我能够梳理出一种独特的后殖民形式的细微差别，这种形式能够从其意识形态的基础上摆脱自比较研究开始以来一直困扰着的简单的东西方二元对立。

My doctoral thesis will explore contemporary adaptations and appropriations of Graeco-Roman antiquity and the Victorian era by authors in China, Japan and Korea, across a range of print, visual and digital media. The relationship between East Asian cultural production and the Euro-American literary canon has been marked by colonialism and imperialism since at least the nineteenth century, but recent examples of cross-cultural adaptation, I contend, have begun moving beyond "the limits of colonial identification [... or] the postcolonial politics of resentment" (Chen 2010) to establish mutually enlightening dialogues with their source texts and contexts. I have chosen to centre my discussion on classical Greece and Rome and Victorian England because of their historical and current prominence in the production and consumption of narrative media not only in East Asia, but also other culturally distant locales. Any project that concerns itself with adaptations of the Euro-American literary canon cannot afford to overlook the subfield of adaptation studies, and mine is no exception. While still "dominated by twentieth-century Anglophone literature and film" (Elliott 2020), adaptation studies has been gradually expanding its ambit to other languages, media and periods. The reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity, however, remains a distinct field of study beyond the reach of most adaptation scholars, with the vast majority of research in the area being conducted by the parallel subfield of classical reception studies instead. These two subfields have developed more or less in isolation from one another despite sharing a similar preoccupation with texts that announce and display an extended engagement with a prior source. The reasons for this curious phenomenon can be partly attributed to the disciplinary divide between Classics and literary studies within the modern academy, but also to more recent theoretical divergences. I believe, however, that these differences unjustly obscure the potential for greater interdisciplinary dialogue. My project thus aims to demonstrate the utility of unifying the tenets and methodology of each subfield, especially with regards to examining cross-cultural adaptation in the East Asian context.Both classical reception and adaptation studies have paid comparatively little attention to how Euro-American texts have been received and repurposed in East Asia. Considering how ill-equipped these conventionally Eurocentric fields are for the task of 'reading' East Asian cross-cultural adaptations, a second major objective of my research will be investigating how their critical idioms can be fruitfully deployed without colonialism or imperialism as intervening influences. In this regard, I will be guided by the analytical framework laid out by Kuan-Hsing Chen in Asia as Method (2010), in order to avoid the pitfalls of reactive postcolonial critique myself.By choosing to focus on Euro-American canonical reception in China, Japan and Korea, I hope to address a lack in current scholarship that extends beyond mere geography. While classical reception and adaptation scholars have now devoted much critical attention to postcolonial writing within their respective disciplinary silos (such as Hardwick 2007, Hutcheon 2006 and Ponzanesi 2014), they have yet to articulate a distinct theoretical position from which to approach texts produced in territories that were never wholly colonised by a Western power, but nevertheless subject to varying degrees of colonial and imperialist hegemony. East Asia is the case study par excellence for the semicolonial condition, and exploring the vicissitudes of cross-cultural adaptation in the region will allow me to tease out the nuances of a unique form of postcoloniality capable of dislodging from its ideological pedestal the simplistic East-West binary that has dogged comparative studies since its inception.