Appropriating the Euro-American Canon in Contemporary East Asia

我的博士论文将探索中国、日本和韩国作家对格雷奥-罗马古代和维多利亚时代的当代改编和挪用，跨越一系列平面、视觉和数字媒体。东亚文化生产和欧美文学经典之间的关系至少自19世纪以来就以殖民主义和帝国主义为标志，但我认为，最近跨文化适应的例子已经开始超越“殖民认同的界限[……或]后殖民怨恨政治”(陈2010)，与它们的原始文本和背景建立相互启发的对话。我选择集中讨论古典希腊、罗马和维多利亚时代的英格兰，因为它们不仅在东亚，而且在其他文化相距遥远的地方，在叙事媒体的生产和消费方面都具有历史和现实的突出地位。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，我的也不例外。虽然适应研究仍然“以二十世纪的英语文学和电影为主”(Elliott 2020)，但适应研究的范围已经逐渐扩展到其他语言、媒体和时期。然而，古典文学对古典文学的接受仍然是一个独特的研究领域，超出了大多数顺应学者的能力范围，该领域的绝大多数研究是由古典接受研究的平行分支领域进行的。这两个子领域或多或少是在彼此孤立的情况下发展起来的，尽管它们对宣布和显示与先前来源的延长接触的文本有着相似的关注。造成这一奇怪现象的部分原因可以归因于现代学术中古典学和文学研究之间的学科分歧，也可以归因于最近的理论分歧。然而，我认为，这些差异不公正地掩盖了加强跨学科对话的潜力。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，特别是在研究东亚语境下的跨文化适应方面。经典的接受和顺应研究都相对较少地关注欧美文本在东亚是如何被接受和改变用途的。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糟糕，我的研究的第二个主要目标将是调查如何在没有殖民主义或帝国主义干预的情况下有效地运用它们的批判性习语。在这方面，我将遵循陈冠兴在《亚洲作为方法》(2010)中提出的分析框架，以避免自己陷入反应性后殖民批评的陷阱。通过选择关注欧美规范在中国、日本和韩国的接受，我希望解决目前学术上的一个不足，超越了单纯的地理学。虽然古典接受和改编学者现在已经在各自的学科领域(如哈德威克2007年、哈钦2006年和庞萨内西2014年)对后殖民写作给予了批判性的关注，但他们还没有阐明一个明确的理论立场来处理在从未完全被西方列强殖民的地区产生的文本，但这些地区仍然受到不同程度的殖民和帝国主义霸权的影响。东亚是研究半殖民地状况的杰出案例，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主义形式的细微差别，这种形式能够摆脱其意识形态基座，即自比较研究成立以来一直困扰着比较研究的简单化的东西方二元论。

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.