Literary Humor and Chinese Modernity: The Adaptation and Translation of Shakespeare, Wilde, and Shaw
Open Access
- Author:
- Tien, Yuk Sunny
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 10, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Thomas Oliver Beebee, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Thomas Oliver Beebee, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Alexander C Y Huang, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Shuang Shen, Committee Member
Martina Kolb, Committee Member
On Cho Ng, Committee Member
Linda Woodbridge, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Adaptation
Translation
Humor
William Shakespeare
Oscar Wilde
George Bernard Shaw - Abstract:
- This study explores how English humor has manifested itself in modern Chinese culture, by focusing on Chinese adaptations and translations of the works of William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. Issuing from contemporary time and space, adaptation demonstrates an emerging new sense of self in its negotiation of identity in the translational process. There are plays that fuse comedy and tragedy, or laughter and tears, but adaptation allows us to see how comedy can be transformed from tragedy, through changing perspectives and the distance or detachment created by time and culture. The adaptation and translation of bawdy humor represents a site of implicit censorship. New constraints, however, also bring new comic creativity and encourage different ways of thinking and speaking about what is supposed to be “forbidden.” The employment of specific local and provincial dialects has also become an important marker of the comic imaginary. Different dialectal strands that make up literary texts and film or stage productions offer a new perspective from which to look into the formation of identity at various levels. Further, when the translation of a comedy is adapted to be performed, what is involved is the intersection and collaboration of verbal and visual humor, as well as the dynamic between the character in a text and the role actualized by an actor on stage.