Writing Green Snake, Dancing White Snake, and the Cultural Revolution as Memory and Imagination --Centered on Yan Geling＇s Baishe

Following Kenneth King＇s pioneering transmedial synthetic writings on post-modern dance practices and Kimerer L. LaMothe＇s call for dance to be treated seriously in religious and philosophical discourses, I examine Yan Geling＇s novella Baishe （White Snake, 1998）, in relation to Lilian Lee＇s novel qingshe （Green Snake, 1986-93）, with a focus on how dancing and writing function literally, metaphorically, dialectically, and reciprocally, in these narratives. In my textual and contextual analyses of Yan＇s White Snake text, I borrow Daria Halprin＇s therapeutic model for accessing life experiences through the body in motion. I argue that, through a creative use of writing and dancing as key metaphors for identity formation and transformation, Yan＇s text, in the context of contemporary China, offers innovative counter-narratives of gender, writing, and the body. Yan＇s White Snake is considered in the following three contexts in this paper： firstly, the expressiveness of the female body in the White Snake story; secondly, the tradition and significance of writing women in Chinese literary history; and thirdly, the development of dance as a profession in the PRC, with a real-life snake dancer at the center. These three different frameworks weave an intricate tapestry that reveals the dialectics of writing and dancing, and language and the body, throughout the latter half of twentieth-century China. Furthermore, Yan＇s text foregrounds the Cultural Revolution as an important chronotope for experimentation with a range of complex gender identities in relation to the expressive and symbolic powers of dancing and writing.

The Analysis of Oriental Tendency in The Lost Daughter of Happiness from the Perspective of Cross-cultural Imagology

Yan Geling’s novel The Lost Daughter of Happiness rebelled to the tendency of Orientalism in the current Western con⁃text.Analyzing this fiction from the perspective of the new subject cross-cultural imagology conforms to the context of cross-cul⁃ture,the need of Chinese cultural consciousness and the interpretation to complex characters.Starting from the image of The Lost Daughter of Happiness,Chinese workers and Chris,taking the method of textual analysis and literature reading,this thesis aims to interpret“the other”-orientalization tendency about male and female from Western culture and the self-orientalization tendency in narrative ways and writing skills in the fiction.However,as a matter of fact,this way can be seemed as a method of Yan Geling’s endeavor to deconstruct the Orientalism from the narrative means and writing skills in a mask of orientalization,which points out a way for the new immigrant literature,that is,diasporic literature writers can make full use of regional barriers,cultural connections and life experiences to open up an enclave of literature.That is,“the third space”came up with by Homi K.Bhabha,so writers can regard it as an experimental plot to break the Western discourse authentically and establish cultural self-confidence gradually.