Wolf Totem Research Articles

Two sides of the same coin? Cross-linguistic sentiment comparison and thematic discovery of reader’s reception of Wolf Totem

Abstract Despite growing attention to the global dissemination of cross-cultural literature, rigorous research on cross-linguistic sentiment analysis remains limited, especially for works like Wolf Totem, which hold both worldwide reach and cultural depth. This study conducted a cross-language sentiment and thematic analysis of online book reviews by Chinese and English readers, utilizing advanced linguistic techniques such as BERT, MAXQDA, and ProtAnt. The analysis reveals that Chinese readers are more critical of the themes “Ethnicity and Culture”, “Society and Politics”, and “Wolf and Wolf Nature”, while English readers respond more positively to “Historical Context and Background”, “Plot and Theme”, and “Emotional Response and Reading Experience”. This study not only highlights these emotional variations but also provides robust methodological insights for cross-linguistic sentiment analysis, showcasing the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches and enhancing understanding of how cultural identity shapes reader engagement.

Framing, rewriting, and reception in world literature: the case of Wolf Totem

When world literature is seen as a product of translation and circulation and as a mode of reading, new world literature attributes, other than literariness, can be inferred, such as relevance to readers, a combination of cultural peculiarity and universality, and accessibility. A case study of Wolf Totem reveals that these attributes can explain how commercial publishers frame, translators rewrite, and readers interpret such works. Commercial publishers’ framing discourses usually highlight a novel’s cultural peculiarity and universality; translators emphasize accessibility while rewriting texts to accommodate target literary norms and readers’ pathos; and readers’ interests usually converge at themes relevant to their lives, thus promoting the evolution of interpretation toward shared experiences of humanity. Using content analysis tools, our study addresses the lack of empirical analysis in literary reception by examining the value of online reader reviews in explaining the effect of framing and rewriting and the readership’s criteria for rewriting. We contend that mass readers participate in the formation and circulation of world literature through word-of-mouth recommendations and sharing reading experiences. Therefore, the significance of online reader reviews deserves scholarly attention in reception and world literature studies.

Ecological Holism Thoughts in Wolf Totem

This thesis attempts to interpret Wolf Totem according to the theory of Ecological Holism advocated by Eugene Odem and the ecological criticism ideas summarized by Wang Nuo to prove that Wolf Totem reveals such ecological holism thoughts as:1. Respect for nature; 2. Nature is a whole in which all species are interrelated; 3. Respect for the nature of all species; 4. Look at everything from the perspective of overall ecological benefits, and thus calls for action to respect and protect both nature and the nature of all species in it.

Against Allegory

More than ten years on from the 2008 financial crisis, two trends of global statism remain dominant: Beijing-led “exceptional neoliberalism” and the emerging “illiberal democracy” topped by Trumponomics, with racist populism looming at the back of both. Even though these persistent programs are remnants of the ideological, national, and economic wars of the previous century, the boundary separating them is permeable. Jiang Rong 姜 戎’s prizewinning novel, Wolf Totem 《狼图腾》, helps us see this porosity. Wolf Totem is the first “Chinese Cultural Revolution” (fictional) memoir written explicitly for Chinese nationals and yet goes on to engage the sensibility of readers from a Western historical and ideological context. This essay critically identifies certain acts of reading Wolf Totem and looks at the way these selected readings, all allegorical in their approach, step across the literary subject to build symbolic extensions that stretch thin the wolves for various purposes. Collectively, such acts of reading expose both an important quality of our historical moment and the ideological function of literary intellectuals within it. They show that our era is one of skepticism about the status quo, one in which certain antidemocratic drives commiserate over historical conflicts and strategize for an extended, ongoing, and relentless process of global dominance. The popular reception of Wolf Totem crystallizes the thrust and conduct of these seeming competing drives. In the final analysis, this essay follows through the symptoms of these drives to reveal a kind of energetics or “primitivist social ethos” alive in the unified way humanity makes extinct any life forms unsubscribed to global statisms in their Beijing or “illiberal democratic” forms.

Cross-cultural transactions in the film adaptation of Wolf Totem

Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem incited a debate over the veracity of its representation of the steppe and the Mongolian culture, which accounts for the obsession with the real in its Sino-French film adaptation. Unfolding a historical trajectory from a “war against nature” during the Cultural Revolution to the present “war of pollution,” the film delves into trans-media rendezvous with polymorphous facets of a Chinese story. The French director Jean-Jacques Annaud can be seen as the simulacra of the Westerner, an envisioned symbol the novel associates with the nomadic spirit of the Mongol in its attempts to reflect on the “weak” Chinese national character. The film fosters its interpretation of the wolf totem towards a new set of social relations through creating a loop of transcultural appropriation. As the Chinese production team anticipates a blockbuster for a global audience which evades the controversial Han viewing position of Jiang Rong’s writing, the French team’s cultural sensibilities register a European imagination of the Mongol that once dominated Eurasia. That said, the western re-territorialization of the borderland resonates with Jiang Rong’s strategy of otherness, transposing a socio-cultural anxiety onto the gendered body of the other.

Two Enlightenments on Chinese Literature Going Out: By Comparing Wolf Totem With China in Ten Words

China still has a serious cultural deficit in international cultural exchanges, and few contemporary Chinese literature works are successfully translated and communicated in foreign countries. However, both Wolf Totem and China in Ten Words have been on Amazon’s list of best sellers after their English versions were published in the United Kingdom and the United States. Based on comparison between them, this paper aims to find the similarities and differences between Wolf Totem and China in Ten Words , and then get two enlightenments on Chinese literature going out: First, successful translation and communication of Chinese literature works share some similarities. Successfully finding the similarities will be conductive to Chinese literature going out. Second, not all successful translation and communication of Chinese literature can objectively and truly present China to the world, taking China in Ten Words as an example. Therefore, the Chinese government should play a more active role in sending out Chinese literature works which could construct China’s national image.

On the Multimodal Analysis Model of Subtitle Translation: A Case Study of Wolf Totem

Film is considered as a visualized and vivid multimodal communication mode, the cross-cultural dissemination of which cannot be separated from its subtitle translation. Based on the Synthetic Theoretical Framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (STF of MDA) put forward by Professor Zhang Delu, the paper analyzed the characteristics and effects of subtitle translation in Wolf Totem from four levels, namely culture, context, content and expression, exploring how different modalities coordinated to construct the whole meaning of the film discourse. After detailed analysis on typical examples, it raised a multimodal analysis model of subtitle translation on the basis of Zhang’s theory, so as to provide a new analytical approach for research on subtitle translation.

Ecology as Method

Abstract In “China as Method,” Mizoguchi Yūzō argues that “a world that takes China as method would be a world in which China is a constitutive element.” Similarly, a world that takes ecology as method is a world in which humans are a constitutive element, one of “the ten thousand things” (wanwu 萬物). In this essay, the author examines distinct ways in which fictional writers imagine relational dynamics between humans, nonhuman animals, regional ecosystems, and the cosmos to theorize ecology as method. Ecology as method works to radically decenter anthropocentric understandings of the cosmos, historicizes regional ecologies in order to illuminate global dynamics, and acknowledges deterritorialization. While mourning loss, it resists sentimentalizing cultural narratives that rationalize the genocide of species as inevitable. This article focuses on three contemporary eco-writers of Inner Mongolia. Mandumai 滿都麥, one of the People's Republic of China's earliest post-Mao eco-writers, romanticizes indigeneity in his Mongolian-language stories (read in this article in Mandarin translation). Mongolian-Han Sinophone writer Guo Xuebo 郭雪波 juxtaposes “grassland logic” against “agrarian logic” in his desert fiction series, illustrating how agrilogistics dominates the ecological imagination of the ethnically diverse desert-dwellers. Finally, the article analyzes the best-selling Wolf Totem by Beijing-based sent-down youth Jiang Rong 姜戎. Despite attributing desertification to Han ignorance, the novel simultaneously maps the steppes via ecological understandings from Hanspace ontology.

Omission and its Impact on Character Reshaping in Literary Translation: A Case Study of Wolf Totem

This article sets out to explore, from a socio-cultural perspective, the heavy use of omission in the English translation of a popular Chinese novel Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong and its side effect: the shifts that take place on the characterization of the main character in the translated text. The descriptive perspective on the use of omission, the highly motivated, deliberate operation, shows that this method is well justified when taking into consideration the socio-cultural constraints. Nevertheless, its side effects that come along cannot be overlooked.

A Study on an Operation of "Wolf Totem": A Successful case of Chinese publishing marketing of the time

A Study on an Operation of "Wolf Totem": A Successful case of Chinese publishing marketing of the time

The Human and the Beast: Humanity, Animality, and Cultural Critique in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

With its capacity to visually demonstrate the interconnectedness of human and other life forms, cinema is perfect for interrogating the set boundaries between humans and animals. This article explores the cinematic representation of the human–animal relationship in two Chinese-language films, Cow and Wolf Totem, and examines the ways in which these two films foreground the animal figures and their interactions with humans to question and destabilize the conventional human–animal divide. Reading Cow through the Deleuzian lens of becoming, Yanhong Zhu argues that this film seeks to reposition humans and animals in “the zone of proximity,” where boundaries can be blurred or dissolved. Zhu further argues that through the shift from “becoming-animal” in the original novel to the animal’s Umwelt (environment) in the film adaptation, Wolf Totem reveals how cinema can possibly grant agency to animals and challenge the anthropocentric human–animal distinction.

Further Questions about the Ecological Themes of Wolf Totem

Further Questions about the Ecological Themes of <i>Wolf Totem</i>

Critique of Academic Proposals that "Chinese Dragon Totem Stemming from Prairie Wolf Totem" in Wolf Totem

Critique of Academic Proposals that "Chinese Dragon Totem Stemming from Prairie Wolf Totem" in Wolf Totem

ĐỐI THOẠI TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT TÔTEM SÓI CỦA KHƯƠNG NHUNG

ĐỐI THOẠI TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT TÔTEM SÓI CỦA KHƯƠNG NHUNG

The Wolf Myth and Chinese Environmental Sentimentalism in Wolf Totem

Over the last three decades, China has experienced a serious environmental crisis that is unprecedented in its history. Although the rapid growth of China's economy has significantly raised their living standard, people there generally feel discontented with the environmental problems, such as air pollution, water pollution, and the extinction of some wild species. In the present Chinese society and culture, there has been wide-scale nostalgia and mourning over the damage to on the harmonious relationship between man and nature. Consequently, there are important intersections between the sentimental and environmental ethics, which lead to what I call the Chinese “environmental sentimentalism.” A conventional understanding of sentimentalism in both Chinese and Western cultures is that the sentimental as an affective orientation/tendency is often characterized by apparent emotional excess. However, from an ethical perspective, sentimentalism is also about developing moral sensibilities based on an intrinsic human nature. In Moral Sentimentalism, Michael Slote discusses the ethics of care in relation to different forms of oppression and injustice, such as those against women: The ethics of care is perhaps the most influential and interesting form of sentimentalism now extant, but the ethics of care has also taken up issues of morality and justice that specifically concern or affect women and other disadvantaged groups or classes of individuals. And though I want to focus attention mainly on feminist thought and aspirations, much of what I shall be saying carried over in substantial and interesting ways to discussions of race, ethnicity, gender orientations, and facts about oppression and previous injustice. (108)

Humans among the Other Animals: Planetarity, Responsibility, and Fiction in ＂Disgrace＂ and ＂Wolf Totem＂

This paper stages readings of several fictional and non-fictional explorations of the relation of man and animal, of limits, obligations, and sympathy, as well as larger ecological questions around creatureliness and planetarity. I argue for a reassessment, via Agamben's by now familiar gloss on Heidegger's discussion of the animal, of an ineradicable creatureliness internal to the human, and then show what coming to terms with this means more broadly in ethical life. Finally, I insist on the role of fiction in the training of the imagination, a priming for the sort of ethical experience essential to good or right life.

On the English Version of Wolf Totem From the Skopos Theory

Lang Tuteng has led a heat wave to readers in China, and has been sold more than 1,000,000 books in a year. In 2008, its English version was released. The best-selling of Wolf Totem has turned out to be a national phenomenon, which has caused widespread academic concern. Scholars try to explore and explain its artistic attraction from different perspectives such as literature, eco-criticism, history, society and so on. So for its English version, some scholars tend to analyze it through different methods, as equivalence theory, subjectivity manipulation theory. Most of them, however, were confined to using a single aspect to interpret the translator’s approach rather than explaining it as a version influenced functional theory. By analyzing the English version of Wolf Totem from different angles, the author tends to discover some inspiration and introspection for the overseas transmission of Chinese literature.

Becoming-Animal: Becoming-Wolf in Wolf Totem

Wolf Totem is not a novel which advocates ‘molar’ wolf characteristics such as violence, brutality and bloodthirstiness, and ‘molar’ wolf laws such as the law of the jungle and the law of profiting at others’ expense, but a novel which reveals to readers a brand new life experience, different affects possessed by the ‘molecular’ wolf, and the becoming-wolf of human beings. Becoming-wolf is not to imitate the above-mentioned characteristics of the ‘molar’ wolf, but to see or imagine what affects the ‘molecular’ wolf has, and make the life force or the assumed life force possessed by the ‘molecular’ wolf transverse a person, so that he or she can also have those affects. Becoming-wolf is to find a line of flight between man and wolf, to get rid of all the restraints imposed by the Confucian culture on the law-abiding, abjectly obedient people, and thus regaining the force of the ‘impersonal, inorganic’ life, so as to become different by endless desiring productions, and enhance mankind's power.

Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem: Toward a Narrative Ecology of the Grassland of Contemporary Inner Mongolia

The ecological crises of our age figure in any number of often seemingly isolated, often seemingly minor eco-narratives—from the demise of flora and fauna in various locales to micro-climatic change to the displacement of indigenous peoples whose natural (and resultantly cultural) environments have been compromised. Increasingly, imaginative literature engages these matters, seeking to plumb and activate what the pioneering environmental literary critic, Lawrence Buell, calls “environmental unconscious,” “a residual capacity … to awake to fuller apprehension of physical environment and one's interdependence with it” (Writing for an Endangered World 22). In this paper, I will examine Jiang Rong's celebrated novel, Wolf Totem (2004), paying particular attention to two mutually implicated themes: the collision between traditional minority Inner Mongolian culture and modernizing majority Han Chinese socioeconomic practices, and the consequent ecological degradation of Inner Mongolia that ensues over the last four decades of the twentieth century as indigenous Mongol values are supplanted by those of the immigrant Han Chinese.

The Chinese Identity in Question: “Descendants of the Dragon” and “The Wolf Totem”

The Chinese Identity in Question: “Descendants of the Dragon” and “The Wolf Totem”