Panel: Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Negotiations
Copanelists: Matilda Gabrielpillai and Zhong Yan
This paper compares and contrasts several Chinese versions of Rousseau’s Confessions in China in an attempt to reveal the role translation plays in the cross-cultural communication of foreign life writings in China. To carry the discussion further, this paper also seeks to use Rousseau’s Confessions as well as its translations in China as a key example to illustrate the great influence foreign life writings have played and may play upon Chinese life writings.
Xu Dejin is Professor of English and Vice Dean of the School of International Studies at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. He got his PhD from Peking University in 2003, and completed his post-doc fellowship at Beijing Normal University in January 2007. He has published over twenty essays on English and American literature and auto/biography studies, including “Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction” (Poetics Today 28.1 [2007]: 43–87). His book Race and Form: Towards a Contextualized Narratology of African American Autobiography was published by Peter Lang in 2007.