Chinese American literature in transcultural vista

In today’s globalizing world the need in widening of every metodological paradigm is crucially obvious. Rapid development of comparative studies asks for the search of new objects in seemingly once for all defined field of Far East literary studies. This field of philological research has always been the frontier of comparative approach (just to mention N. I. Konrad and A. H. Plaks), but turning to American by citizenship writers might be found quite unexpected. Such turn in its early development was aimed to study “oriental” topoi in works of Sui Sin Far, Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan – now quite renown and doubtlessly American writers. These studies, conditioned with the rise of anti-orientalism (E. Said), literary imagology (Jean-Francois Brossaud, M. Wintle, Manfred Beller, Joep Leersen) and, more importantly, growing self-consciousness of Chinese Americans, reveals the transcultural quality of their writings: it is impossible to find either pure “Chinese-ness” or “American-ness” in these literature. Multiple definitions of hybridity, plurality, creolization, balcanization prove un-instrumental for separating ethnic, social and other identities. Virtually simple idea of envisioning these literary phenomena as planetary, born to life not by any particular collective identity but as from influx, interference, diffusion of all actual identities in fact appeared to be quite complicated. Functioning of Chinese poetics and semantics in English language fiction is exemplified by works of Sui Sin Far (“The Leaves From Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”, 1890) where her current American reality is portrayed through the lens of Chinese philosophy of sincerity (cheng), drastically contacted to the “oriental” stereotype of “Confucianism” and Frank Chin (“Gunga Din Highway”, 1994), composed as a complex interference of reflections of various renderings of the cultural otherness (starting with R. Kipling’s “Gunga Din”) and romantics of Chinese classic “Three Kingdoms”, esoteric semantics of “Thirty Six Stratagems” and Joycean epiphany.

Inherent qualities of literature, defined by M. Bakhtin, J. Lotman, J. Kristeva: dialogism, ambivalence, polyglotism, intertextuality become as never explicit. As for the narrow field of Chinese American literary studies, it is apparent in works by Amrita Kaur, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, David Palumbo-lu, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, E. San Juan, Lan Dong, Begona Simal Gonzalez and Elizabetta Marino, Lawrence J. Trudeau, Maria C. Zamora, Jingqi Lin which are focused on transcultural nature of Asian American literature. Writings of Fa Myenne Ng, M. H. Kingston, Frank Chin, Gish Jen, David Henry Hwang, Chang-rae Lee are examined not as ethnic literature by definition marginalized, differed from American mainstream literature, but as natural implementation of both Western and Eastern literary traditions and aesthetics.