Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement

Shuangyi Li is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at Lund University in Sweden. Besides Proust, he is interested in 20th-century European and global modernism(s), transcultural writings by writers of Far Eastern Asian diasporic communities, processes of international canonization, reception studies, translation studies, travel writings, and critical models of world and comparative literature. He is currently working on a project on literature and art of the Chinese diaspora in France within the broader framework of cultural translation and intermediality.

• Introduction.- Part I: The Reception of Proust in China.- Proust and the Chinese Translations.- Proust and Mainland Chinese Writers: La Recherche and Its Postmodern Hypertexts.- Part II: Proust in the Chinese Diaspora: François Cheng’s Le Dit de Tianyi.- Intertextual and Paratextual Relations between La Recherche and Le Dit.- Traits chinois / démarche proustienne.- Conclusion.

“Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement is a study that deals with a vast array of concepts, references, corpora and languages in order to provide a prismatic vision of a core problem: how can we understand the main traits of the reception and recreation of La Recherche by Chinese translators and writers? … Shuangyi Li allows the reader to feel relatively comfortable even though some of the themes covered in his book might be entirely original or unfamiliar to some readers.” (Yuri Cerqueira dos Anjos, OCCT Oxford Comparative Criticism Translation, October 25, 2019)“Shuangyi Li has produced an engaging, distinctive work of scholarship that makes a welcome addition to Proust studies while also contributing to a range of other fields. It brings a critical assessment of Proust’s reception in China into dialogue with theoretical thinking about diaspora, translation, canon-formation, intertextuality, and the transcultural. It is a stimulating read, enriched by the useit makes of existing critical writing on Proust’s novel as well as a wider spread of work in translation studies, world and comparative literature, and intertextuality.” (Adam Watt, French Studies, March 16, 2019)