英文摘要 |
The studies on the Nobel Prize writer Pearl S. Buck have been revived in the past three decades in mainland China. Unlike earlier criticisms which often fault Buck for her misrepresentation of Chinese culture or for her inauthentic portrayal of Chinese society, these recent studies, adopting either feminist or postcolonial perspectives, have mainly focused upon the cross-cultural significance of Buck's realist novels. Such positive readings of Buck's realist novels such as The Good Earth trilogy, however, fail to respond well to those key issues that critics in the 1930s-40s found problematic in the trilogy; that is, the inadequacy of historical truthfulness in Buck's realist novels on life in China. To negotiate between the negative reading of Buck of the 1930s-40s and the positive reading of her realist novels of the past three decades, this paper proposes to take recent positivist readings to task by zooming in on Buck's The Good Earth trilogy. Drawing on the concept of ”mimesis” in György Lukács and Paul Ricoeur, and appropriating the theory of what David Der-Wei Wang terms ”verisimilitude,” I argue that Buck's realism falls far short of achieving verisimilitude. In this analysis, a pointed response to, and a better understanding of, the criticism of the 1930s-40s could be achieved while a re-evaluation of the East-West cultural dialogue in Buck's works might be formulated. |