Tsz Kit Yim

Role
Adviser: Paize Keulemans
Bio/Description

Classic Chinese Novels and Global Media Climate: Ecological Form, Affective World-Making and Infrastructural Network

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the world’s global entanglement with China through what I call classic Chinese novels’ “global media climates.” From the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to the “rise of China” after the millennium, classic Chinese novels such as Xiyouji (Journey to the West) and Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), have circulated around the world in the forms of translations, rewritings, theatrical, and other media adaptations. However, three dominant approaches have thus far limited our understanding of such phenomenon. First, the China-centered approach, which assumes that the novels’ spread symbolizes “Chinese influence” over its neighbors. Second, the China-decentering approach, which accentuates how the novels have been re-appropriated or absorbed as “national canons” in, for example, Japan or Korea. Third, the transnational and pluralist approach, which fully acknowledges the portable use of classic Chinese novels in multiple contexts. While this third approach correctly highlights heterogeneity, it still fails to explain why multitudinous agents across times, spaces or even races, have to and want to assert their own “versions” by returning and resorting to, as well as (re)playing with and participating in the very same infrastructure of classic Chinese novels from time to time. This dissertation suggests that the answer lies with classic Chinese novels themselves – their forms of affect, as well as their affordance of imaginative materials for collaborative world-making. Drawing from new materialism, actor-network theory, ecocriticism, affect theory and infrastructuralism, this dissertation shows how the ecological, formal, affective and infrastructural qualities of classic Chinese novels distinctively afford (i.e. providing materials for) and invite adaptations to globally take place as world-making events. Theorizing Hongloumeng and Jin Ping Mei’s affordances of ecological forms, affective worldmaking and infrastructural network as “global media climates” in the 20th and 21st century, this dissertation adopts a non-anthropocentric approach in showing how cosmological forms of affect (such as “water” in Daoism, and “wind” as conceived in Chinese and East Asian literature) serially link the original novels to each and all of their adaptations across times, spaces, and cultures, dissolving the human-non-human as well the socialism-and-capitalism dichotomy in the age of Anthropocene and Sinocene.