Red Chamber Research Articles

Bao-yu and the Second Self:

AbstractIn the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber, 红楼梦), the numerous instances of pairing, mirroring, and doubling around the protagonist Jia Bao-yu serve to highlight a philosophical view of mutability grounded in Ying-Yang theory and Daoism, to emphasize the dynamic process of acquiring self-knowledge, and to subvert and problematize dualistic classification (truth/fiction, right/wrong, real/unreal). By considering the significance of the hero’s transformation in this context from the rejected Stone, into the Divine Luminescent Stone-in-Waiting, and then into Jia Bao-yu and his second self, I seek to expose the utopian dimensions of the text grounded in tension between Daoism and Confucianism and exemplified by Jia Bao-yu and Zhen Bao-yu respectively.

Women’s Economic Activities and Sense of Economy in The Dreams of Red Chamber

Women’s Economic Activities and Sense of Economy in The Dreams of Red Chamber

Reframing the Boundaries of Household and Text in Hou Honglou Meng

Hou honglou meng (1796) (Later dream of the red chamber) is the earliest sequel to Cao Xueqin’s Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber). It does more than redeem the romantic tragedy of the parent novel: it also intervenes to strengthen the dissolving Jia household and family structure and offers a conscious act of literary critique on the novel. Hou honglou meng deliberately intervenes in the parent novel's metafictionality, reconstructs the Jia mansion and redraws its boundaries, and rewrites its family dynamics with a new balance of emotion (qing) and ritual (li). In the process it offers new visions of the wealthy household, of romance and marriage, of the domestic novel as a genre, and of the relationship between text, author(s), readers, and critics.

Sleeping Our Way to Consciousness: Jim Findlay’s Dream of the Red Chamber

At a moment when site-specific installations, urban soundwalks, immersive environments, and participatory experiences have (yet again) become popular, Jim Findlay’s Dream of the Red Chamber stands in sharp contrast, embracing what seems like the most passive state—sleep. Is it possible, via a sleep-inducing performance, to become conscious of our own letting go?

Approaches to TeachingThe Story of the Stone(Dream of the Red Chamber). Edited by Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu. New York: Modern Language Association, 2012. ix, 515 pp. $37.50 (cloth); $19.75 (paper).

Approaches to Teaching<i>The Story of the Stone</i>(Dream of the Red Chamber). Edited by Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu. New York: Modern Language Association, 2012. ix, 515 pp. $37.50 (cloth); $19.75 (paper).

MULTIPLE AUTHORS DETECTION: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER

Inspired by the authorship controversy of Dream of the Red Chamber and the application of machine learning in the study of literary stylometry, we develop a rigorous new method for the mathematical analysis of authorship by testing for a so-called chrono-divide in writing styles. Our method incorporates some of the latest advances in the study of authorship attribution, particularly techniques from support vector machines. By introducing the notion of relative frequency as a feature ranking metric, our method proves to be highly effective and robust. Applying our method to the Cheng–Gao version of Dream of the Red Chamber has led to convincing if not irrefutable evidence that the first 80 chapters and the last 40 chapters of the book were written by two different authors. Furthermore, our analysis has unexpectedly provided strong support to the hypothesis that Chapter 67 was not the work of Cao Xueqin either. We have also tested our method to the other three Great Classical Novels in Chinese. As expected no chrono-divides have been found. This provides further evidence of the robustness of our method.

English

The world seems aware that China is among the countries with the largest Buddhist population. The global village may say that in Taiwan and Mainland China, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism are combined, mixed and blurred. Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢Hong Lou Meng) was written in the 18 th century against such a backdrop. Since the 1990s, English as a Foreign Language teaching and learning, especially in Taiwan, has aimed at mastering five skills—translation added to traditionally recognized skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Taiwanese students may feel translating from English to Chinese easier due to their firm grasp of the target language and culture; however, students should be aware that translating from Chinese to English aids not only in disseminating source language cultural knowledge but also is more profitable than translating from English to Chinese in terms of wages earned. When rendering Chinese literary works to English, a translator inevitably encounters the problem of cultural translation. This paper concentrates on translation of texts, including Taoism and Buddhism expressions in Hong Lou Meng by Cao Xuěqin, into English by David Hawkes and Xianyi Yang & Gladys Yang. Translating Hong Lou Meng in the 1970s, both renditions made use of endnotes, transliteration, as well as a number of other methods. Examples will explain how they did the tedious job. While translating Hong Lou Meng to English, both made the religious background a little confusing to target language readers. Xianyi Yang & Gladys Yang’s version was found to be more faithful to the religion but at the cost of readability. Implications for teaching translation of texts with religious contexts are discussed. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2014-2002-09 Keywords: Dream of the Red Chamber; literary translation; religion; Buddhism; Christianity

Bao-yu: a mental disorder or a cultural icon?

The embodied human subject is dynamically connected to his or her historico-sociocultural context, the soil from which a person's psyche is nourished as multiplex meanings are absorbed and enable personal development. In each culture certain towering artistic works embody this perspective. The Dream of the Red Chamber introduces Jia Bao-yu--a scion of the prestigious Jia family--and his relationships with a large cast of characters. Bao-yu is controversial but, at the time of the family's tragic collapse, he can be seen as embodying a spiritual struggle in which his instinct, nature, sensitivity, and creativity are grounded in his transcendent relationship with a fragment of the world stone, an eternal source of energy and creativity. We are invited to draw on a metaphysical level of thought to consider his struggles with man-made hierarchies and a situated historico-sociocultural order in such a way as to live out his spiritual being. As such, the novel is closely relevant to questions of spirituality in bioethics. Through personal experiences, passions, creativity, and relationships with others, the body is inscribed, forming the soul, which may be misconstrued (for instance, through a medical or Cartesian reformulation of events) but which can be seen as the site of ethical and spiritual thought.

Autoencoder for words

This paper presents a training method that encodes each word into a different vector in semantic space and its relation to low entropy coding. Elman network is employed in the method to process word sequences from literary works. The trained codes possess reduced entropy and are used in ranking, indexing, and categorizing literary works. A modification of the method to train the multi-vector for each polysemous word is also presented where each vector represents a different meaning of its word. These multiple vectors can accommodate several different meanings of their word. This method is applied to the stylish analyses of two Chinese novels, Dream of the Red Chamber and Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

A Comparative Study between The Dream of Red Chamber and A Tale of Genji

A Comparative Study between The Dream of Red Chamber and A Tale of Genji

Characters-Flowers/Antiquities Illustration of The Dream of Red Chamber and Flowers in the Mirror

Characters-Flowers/Antiquities Illustration of The Dream of Red Chamber and Flowers in the Mirror

Borges and the Multiverse: Some Further Thoughts

Various critics have claimed that elements of Borges’ story ‘El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan’ (1941) uncannily foreshadow contemporary cosmological theories of the ‘mulitverse’, and in particular the ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. This essay locates the source of Borges’ idea in the work of the English science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon and, by linking this unacknowledged and previously unexplored intertext with other, more explicit literary allusions in the story (especially to the Chinese novel ‘The Dream of the Red Chamber’, but also to Goethe), goes on to explore the ethical as well as aesthetic reasons behind Borges’ electing to write in apparently ‘fantastic’ fashion in two stories set during times of war (principally ‘El jardín’ but also ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’).

On the exceptional language phenomena of “the Dream of Red Chamber”

On the exceptional language phenomena of “the Dream of Red Chamber”

Refashioning Print Literature:

In addressing the issue of modern China and world literature in the age of globalization, we should not neglect this fact: in contemporary Chinese society as well as elsewhere, the elite literary market has been increasingly shrinking, with more and more readers reading online rather than in the libraries, for there have appeared numerous netizens who write and publish online. I think it's hard to say whether or not the Internet will ruin or contrib- ute to the popularization of serious literature: a lot of print literature, chiefly serious literature, is likely to be published on the Internet, but although that means fewer books will be printed on paper, it also means that it will pos- sible for more and more readers to get access to serious literature, including translated world literature online. Since translated literature comprises a large part of the literary market, Internet writing might well contribute a bit to the popularization of world literature in China as well. But my concern in this article is the extent to which the Internet will help to popularize literature. Obviously, the emergence of the Internet in our daily lives provides us with a new way to communicate and express our feelings and opinions. As a global system of interconnected computer networks, the Internet con- nects billions of users (or their computers) worldwide by using the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). Thus, for most users, it is the first time that they have not been limited by space and time in communicating with others, and they now have the opportunity to know other people's (public or private) stories and share their experiences in just a matter of seconds. Speed changes everything and makes things go more smoothly in our lives. Not only do the younger generations like to communicate online, but even the older scholars are gradually taking interest in communicating through the Internet.

Court Trials and Miscarriage of Justice in Dream of the Red Chamber

This paper aims to contribute to the on-going scholarship on the relations between law and literature with a focus on legal and institutional issues presented in the Honglou meng [Dream of the Red Chamber], which is widely acclaimed as the greatest Chinese novel. For this purpose, two homicide cases from this novel will be selected for a close examination, and in the course of case analysis, the following questions will be addressed: What kind of judicial practice and politico-legal culture was revealed in these cases? What was the relationship between law and politics in late imperial China? What roles did the law play in the state and society in late imperial China?

Opinion on Slave Personality and Tragic Life in “Dream of the Red Chamber”

Opinion on Slave Personality and Tragic Life in “Dream of the Red Chamber”

Tragic Ending and Inversion in The Tale of Orchid Dream

AbstractThis essay examines the representation of gender conflict in the late Qing novel Lanhua meng qizhuan (The tale of orchid dream) through an analysis of the novel's responses to its two literary models: Cao Xueqin's Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber) and Wen Kang's Ernü yingxiong zhuan (A tale of heroes and lovers, 1878). Written as an imitation of Cao Xueqin's masterpiece and a reversal of Wen Kang's novel (itself also a rewriting of Cao Xueqin's work), Lanhua meng qizhuan consciously returns to the tragic mode of representation while it re-polarizes the themes of heroism and love (or ritualized morality versus private feeling) in its portrayal of the married life of a female hero, Song Baozhu. Through the deterioration of the heroine's marriage and her death, the novel exposes the deep-seated male centeredness in Chinese society and culture. At the same time, it reveals the ideological and artistic clashes of the hero-lover model promoted by Wen Kang and undermines his effort of assimilating qing (love, feelings) into the domain of public morality. The author's effort in Lanhua meng qizhuan, while seriously tackling the social problem of gender inequality in its time, also challenged old conventions and opened new avenues in Chinese fiction.

Apology strategies between social unequals in The Dream of the Red Chamber

This is a study of apology strategies deployed by social unequals in The Dream of the Red Chamber. It is found that, among the eleven instances of apologies collected from the novel, four variables together determine one’s choices of apology strategies, i.e. the social distance between the apologizer and the apologizee, their power relationship, the seriousness of the offence which leads to the apology, and the degree of the right the apologizer is assumed to have in apologizing. The lower-status apologizers typically adopted the self-degeneration and other-elevation strategies and spoke up to the higher-status victims, while the higher-status apologizers typically gave priority to protecting their own faces and spoke down to the lower-status victims in combining different strategies. The apologies from the lower-status servant apologizers were rarely accepted while those from the higher-status apologizers were often accepted on the spot. On the whole, the higher-status participants enjoyed more freedom in choosing which apology strategy to adopt than the lower-status participants.

Study on the Ideological Critic Movement for Yu Pingbo and Hu Shu's Research on the Dream of the Red Chamber in 1954-55

Study on the Ideological Critic Movement for Yu Pingbo and Hu Shu's Research on the Dream of the Red Chamber in 1954-55

Two Stories

While the work of later Beijing writers like Wang Shuo has come to take a central place in contemporary Chinese literature, some earlier modernist writers have not been fully translated for English readers. Of the important early Beijing authors, He Qifang (1912–1977) occupies a unique position. An early active Communist in the 1940s (he attended the famous Yan'an talks where Mao famously laid down the mission of communist literature) He's writing was surprisingly apolitical and aesthetically complex. A noted “redologist” (one who studies the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin), he became most well known for the stream of consciousness style he used in Painted Dreams and Notes on Returning Home. Like Tang Xuehua of Shanghai, He Qifang's work has been overshadowed by the work of more prominent writers of his period—Mao Dun, Shen Congwen, among others. Unlike the highly imagistic, sometimes wildly romantic poetic essays of Painted Dreams, the five pieces in Diary are remarkably realist in subject and style, exploring in plain detail the dangers and injustices He Qifang encountered in his home province.