Appropriating the Euro-American Canon in Contemporary East Asia
Lead Research Organisation:
King's College London
Department Name: Comparative Literature
Abstract
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.
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.
