Проблемы литератур Дальнего Востока. Часть 1

Новые вопросы изучения классической китайской литературы... Issues of Far Eastern Literatures. Vol. 1. 2018 243 from Middle Mandarin to the Early Modern Mandarin’ (Norman, 1988), and this supersession engenders various linguistic phenomena, thus enriches the novel’s substantial corpus value. Besides, Cao Xueqin, the author of the novel is highly artistically accomplished; his refinement of the Chinese language makes The Dream of the Red Chamber a representative of the peak of Chinese literary language. Therefore, linguistic approaches to The Dream of Red Chamber have become an indispensable composition of Hóng Xué (termed as Redology in English) the academic study of The Dream of the Red Chamber. By the year of 1996, linguistic researches on The Dream of the Red Chamber was never seriously valued in academia, and for a long period of time, academic researches on the novel remained merely within the field of literature, aesthetics, and sociology. In the year of 1996, Wu Jingcun published his work, lj㓒ᾬỖ Ⲵ䈝䀰NJ that marked a breakthrough in the linguistic field of The Dream of the Red Chamber, henceforth, scholars began to pay attention to the field of linguistic approaches to the novel that depicts the peak of the Chinese language and reflects numerous cultural phenomena. Previous studies have explored the relevance of the cultural and linguistic positioning of different versions of the English translation, but thus far no research has been undertaken from the perspectives of cultural linguistics meaning to analyze the Chinese cultural phenomena. Therefore, it is significant to delve into the language aspects during that particular time period when the Chinese language was in its own transition sustained by a theoretical structure of cultural linguistics. Part One: The Untranslatable Cultural Features The Dream of the Red Chamber, although only presented the life of the aristocratic class, possesses some deep cultural roots that can still be seen in the Chinese way of thinking, speaking and writing. And the dispassion towards the New Culture Movement and reflections upon the upheavals in traditional values have withdrawn the academic attention back to Chinese classical literature. Now the Chinese scholars began to realize that no progressive cross-cultural communication could be made unless they acknowledge such deeply rooted cultural features of the Chinese language, literature, philosophy and logic. Moreover, for many years, since it is not a novel that can be easily deciphered, and so as David Hawkes put it, ‘[…] if you are not familiar with either baihua or modern wenyan, it is quite difficult, because it’s written in a very strange style to start with, that first chapter…’ (Hawkes, 2000) Because of this language barrier, scholars researching on Dream of the Red Chamber chiefly relied on the translation. However, readers at first can be confused if unaware of its narrative style and the stringent censorship that the Manchu ruling class exercised, and all of these confusions may impede further researches.