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Abstract
My dissertation analyzes the linguistic negotiation of multiple consciousness in works by Theresa Cha (Dictée 1982), Chuang Hua (Crossings 1968), Sui Sin Far (Mrs. Spring Moon Fragrance and Other Writings 1912), Kazuo Ishiguro (A Pale View of Hills 1982), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse 1927). As diasporic Asian authors writing in English receive increasing international recognition, the canonization of literatures in English and their politics within global contexts have become a hot topic in academic discussions. As an instrument in the global circulation of texts, translation is an important site for examining these “first world” and “third world” exchanges. This study concentrates on figurative and actual translations deployed to negotiate discontinuities in divided or multiple consciousness for an eclectic group of authors including the Eurasian Canadian modern fictionist Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Asian American performance artist Theresa Cha, and British modernist Virginia Woolf. By considering these authors together, I interrogate essentialist assumptions about Asian heritage in arguing that the split consciousness of Woolf is possibly as linguistically vexed and liminally Real as that of Cha, Far/Eaton, Chuang Hua, or Ishiguro.
I examine how the selected authors use metaphors of translation to explore problems of representation, and how the struggle between “first world” inquiry and “third world” objecthood figure in their narratives. I compare and contrast the split consciousness of the woman artist Lily Briscoe as “other” and female artist to the Eurasian sensibilities of Sui Sin Far, examining their uses of figurative translation in negotiating from the margins of racial and gender identities. I read the practice of translation in Chuang Hua's Crossings as a linguistic model of hybridity where noncolloquial rhythms seem to convey the spirit of a non-English speaking existence. Figurative translation in Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills mediates cultural consciousness as simultaneously seeming one's own yet ventriloquized or imitated, further displacing the idea of an “origin.” Lastly, I focus on the roles of mysticism and language in Dictée 's poetic deconstruction of empire, engaging metaphysical issues salient in the history of translation studies to describe how Cha and each of the selected authors use figures of translation to bridge discontinuous subjectivities, obscuring the linguistic and ideological boundaries between East and West.
