毕业论文课题相关文献综述

1. Introduction

Guan Moye, born 17 February 1955, better known by the pen name Mo Yan, is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. He has been referred by Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and by Jim Leach as the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

1.1 The Republic of Wine and its English version

The novel has two distinct narrative threads, one of a standard fiction form following a detective, and the other a series of letters between "Mo Yan" and an aspiring author, Li Yidou, who is a fan of his work. The book contains ten chapters, each chapter several parts. The "detective" thread follows a special investigator, Ding Gou'er, sent to rural China to investigate claims of cannibalism. The "letters" thread consists of letters exchanged between the ambitious writer, and "Mo Yan", as well as short stories that Li Yidou sends to "Mo Yan". As the novel progresses, the focus shifts from the Ding Gou'er standard narrative thread to the Li Yidou/Mo Yan one. Some characters appear in both threads.

Howard Goldblatt is a translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese (mainland and Taiwan) fiction. He translated works of Mo Yan, including six of Mo Yan's novels and collections of stories. Goldblatt believes that The Republic of Wine is the most fanciful, complex, and abundant Chinese novel in terms of creation techniques.

1.2 Research purpose

This study is undertaken with the aim of exploring the stylistic features of The Republic of Wine, both the original novel and the one translated by Howard Goldblatt, in order to judge whether the style of the English version accords with that of the Chinese text. Though it is not the best-known one created by Mo Yan, this novel has successfully imitated a variety of literature styles as detective, hallucinatory realistic, symbolistic, expressionistic, cruel realistic, lyric, structuralist, and swordsman stories. Past researches on this novel mainly focused on literary criticism; studies on its English translation are limited, let alone stylistic perspective. By discussing stylistic equivalence achieved bu Goldblatt, this thesis may further rairse peoples awareness to apply stylistics concepts to translation. Besides, this research may inspire translators to take stylistics into consideration while working on literature works; therefore more excellent Chinese fictions would be known and accepted by readers abroad.

1.3 Layout of the Paper

This thesis consists of five chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology, results and discussion, and conclusion.

Chapter One serves as a panorama of the texts and this current study. It provides the research background, significance of the research, objectives of the research and the outline of the research. Chapter Two reviews the relevant studies on style and stylistics at home and abroad, especially regarding translation studies from the perspective of stylistics. Chapter Three describes the research methodology and addresses research questions, steps and methods. Chapter Four is the main part discussing the results of this study. Chapter Five summarizes the important and major findings and proposes implications of the present paper.