论韦斯特法尔的空间隐喻与世界文学观——从《子午线的牢笼》谈起

Westphal’s Spatial Metaphor and His View of World Literature:A Discussion of La Cage des méridiens and More

贝尔唐·韦斯特法尔是当代西方地理批评的奠基者和领军人物。在获得巴黎-列日文学奖的新著《子午线的牢笼》一书中,韦斯特法尔大量使用隐喻,引领读者从多种维度重新审视全球化语境中文学空间与真实空间之间的互动关系。其中两则举足轻重的隐喻引人注目:示播列和群岛。韦斯特法尔以示播列映射西方与其他世界之间不合理的边界,以群岛隐喻反思中心/边缘的二元对立。他进而以越界性作为贯穿两则隐喻的隐含线索。在韦斯特法尔看来,作为全球化时代的重要特征,越界性模糊了国别文学的边界和作家身份,消解了文学经典的权威性。综上可见,韦斯特法尔的地理批评思想与法语"世界文学"概念具有很高的契合度。

Bertrand Westphal is the founding and pioneering theorist of the contemporary Western geocriticism.In his La Cage des méridiens,a winner of Paris-Liège Literature Prize,he uses a lot of metaphors to guide readers through a multi-dimensional reexamination of the interaction between the literary space and the real space within the global context.Among them,two important metaphors are worth noting in particular:shibboleth and archipelago.Westphal uses the former to delineate the irrational boundary between the West and the rest of the world,whereas he metaphorizes the latter into a reflection on the binary opposition of center and margin,thereby relying on transgressivity as a connection between the implicit threads of the two metaphors.In Westphal’s view,as an important feature of the era of globalization,transgressivity blurs the boundaries of national literatures and the identities of writers,and undermines the authority of literary canons.In a word,Westphal’s theory of geocriticism is highly compatible with the concept of“littérature-monde”in French.