A Comparative Study of the Novels of Can Xue and Franz Kafka

Author: Luo Fan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: Kafka (1883–1924), male, born into a Jewish merchant family in Prague, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is hailed as the pioneer of modernist fiction and the guardian of the modern world. Can Xue (b. 1953), female, whose original name is Deng Xiaohua, is from Changsha, Hunan. Born into a intellectual family that suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution, she is regarded as one of China's most representative "avant-garde" novelists and a guardian of the spirit of modernist fiction, as well as the guardian of pure literature. In the early 20th century in the West and the early 21st century in the East, two modernist writers with similar artistic styles had an "extremely interesting, even, one might say, exhilarating" cross-temporal collision and spiritual dialogue (a quote by Deng Xiaomang). How could this happen? How did it happen? Under the circumstances of such vastly different historical backgrounds, cultural contexts, life experiences, ideological emotions, and gender identities, how could they achieve communication in literature, which is the most enigmatic of all things? How did they communicate? In what aspects? Exploring and interpreting this question is the task of this book.