“Include Me Out”: Reading Eileen Chang as a World Literature Author

“Include Me Out”: Reading Eileen Chang as a World Literature Author

This article examines the notion of “world literature,” together with its applicability and limitations, by re-visiting the case of modern Chinese writer and culturaltranslator Eileen Chang. The first section juxtaposes Chang's “hypercanonicity” in modern Chinese literature with her obscurity in world literature. The second section addresses Chang's “Lin Yutang dream” and traces her early aspiration to become a world literature author by looking at her English publications and translations between 1938 and 1941. The third section discusses how Chang views world literature by analyzing closely a speech she gave in the US on translation. The fourth section discusses how English-writing scholars of modern Chinese literature are attempting to map Chang into the realm of “world literature” by reversing the “technologies of recognition” through the act of anthologizing and actively participating in academic discussions. This article considers the dialectic of rebellion and complicity in the production of the reverse discourse of “World Literature,” with a view to opening up new possibilities for the application of the notion. The argument is that when we read Chang as an author of world literature, we are reading how Chang was gradually mapped into the sphere of world literature through a continuous and incomplete process.