Representations of China by Western Travellers in the Blogsphere

28 Pages·2016·5.26 MB·English

by  Calzati, Stefano

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CULTURA
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
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CULTURA AND AXIOLOGY
Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of
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2016 Vol XIII No 2
Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed journal devo- 2
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A
R
U
T
L
U
C
CULTURA
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE
CULTURA AND AXIOLOGY
Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of
2016
2016 Vol XIII No 2
Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed journal devo- 2
ted to philosophy of culture and the study of value. It aims to pro-
mote the exploration of different values and cultural phenomena in
FY
OG
regional and international contexts. The editorial board encourages Y O
HL
the submission of manuscripts based on original research that are PO
OXI
judged to make a novel and important contribution to understan- LOSD A
ding the values and cultural phenomena in the contempo rary world. HIN
A
OF PRE
U
L T
AL
NU
RC
U
O
J
L
A
N
O
TI
A
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www.peterlang.com
CULTURA 2016_271562_VOL_13_No2_GR_A5Br.indd 1 14.11.16 KW 46 10:45
CULTURA
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY
Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology
E-ISSN (Online): 2065-5002
ISSN (Print): 1584-1057
Advisory Board
Prof. Dr. David Altman, Instituto de Ciencia Política, Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile
Prof. Emeritus Dr. Horst Baier, University of Konstanz, Germany
Prof. Dr. David Cornberg, University Ming Chuan, Taiwan
Prof. Dr. Paul Cruysberghs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Prof. Dr. Nic Gianan, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines
Prof. Dr. Marco Ivaldo, Department of Philosophy “A. Aliotta”, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy
Prof. Dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University, USA
Prof. Dr. Maximiliano E. Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina
Prof. Dr. Richard L. Lanigan, Southern Illinois University, USA
Prof. Dr. Christian Lazzeri, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France
Prof. Dr. Massimo Leone, University of Torino, Italy
Prof. Dr. Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, Complutense University, Madrid, Spain
Prof. Dr. Christian Möckel, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
Prof. Dr. Devendra Nath Tiwari, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India
Prof. Dr. José María Paz Gago, University of Coruña, Spain
Prof. Dr. Mario Perniola, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy
Prof. Dr. Traian D. Stănciulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania
Prof. Dr. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Purdue University & Ghent University
Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief: Co-Editors:
Prof. dr. Nicolae Râmbu Prof. dr. Aldo Marroni
Faculty of Philosophy and Social- Dipartimento di Lettere, Arti e Scienze Sociali
Political Sciences Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Via dei Vestini, 31, 66100 Chieti Scalo, Italy
B-dul Carol I, nr. 11, 700506 Iasi, Romania [email protected]
[email protected] PD Dr. Till Kinzel
Englisches Seminar
Technische Universität Braunschweig,
Bienroder Weg 80,
38106 Braunschweig, Germany
[email protected]
Editorial Assistant: Dr. Marius Sidoriuc
Designer: Aritia Poenaru
Cultura
International Journal of Philosophy
of Culture and Axiology
Vol. 13, No. 2 (2016)
Editor-in-Chief
Nicolae Râmbu
Guest Editors:
Asunción López-Varela
and Ananta Charan Sukla
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
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Cover Image: © Aritia Poenaru
ISSN 2065-5002
ISBN 978-3-631-71562-8 (Print)
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DOI 10.3726/b10729
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CROSS-CULTURAL INTERMEDIALITY:
FROM PERFORMANCE TO DIGITALITY

CONTENTS

Asunción LÓPEZ-VARELA AZCÁRATE 7
Introduction: Performance, Medial Innovation and Culture

Ananta Charan SUKLA 13
Indian Intercultural Poetics: the Sanskrit Rasa-Dhvani Theory

Krishna PRAVEEN and V. Anitha DEVI 19
Kathakali: The Quintessential Classical Theatre of Kerala

Jinghua GUO 27
Adaptations of Shakespeare to Chinese Theatre

Cyril-Mary Pius OLATUNJI and Mojalefa L.J. KOENANE 43
Philosophical Rumination on Gelede: an Ultra-Spectacle Performance

María VIVES AGURRUZA 53
The Cultural Impact of the Nanking Massacre in Cinematography:
On City of Life and Death (2009) and The Flowers of War (2011)

Qingben LI 67
China’s Micro Film: Socialist Cultural Production in the Micro Era

Annette THORSEN VILSLEV 77
Following Pasolini in Words, Photos, and Film, and his Perception
of Cinema as Language

Adile ASLAN ALMOND 83
Reading Rainer Fassbinder’s adaptation Fontane Effi Briest

Yang GENG and Lingling PENG 103
The Time Phenomenon of Chinese Zen
and Video Art in China: 1988-1998
Carolina FERNÁNDEZ CASTRILLO 125
Lyric Simultaneities: From “Words in Freedom” to Holopoetry

Janez STREHOVEC 137
Digital Art in the Artlike Culture and Networked Economy

Stefano CALZATI 153
Representations of China by Western Travellers in the Blogsphere

Horea AVRAM 173
Shared Privacy and Public Intimacy: The Hybrid Spaces
of Augmented Reality Art
10.3726/CUL2016-2_153
Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 13(2)/2016: 153–172

Representations of China by Western Travellers
in the Blogsphere

Stefano CALZATI
University of Leeds,
Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK
[email protected]

Abstract. This article adopts a transmedial perspective in order to investigate
narrative similarities and differences between print and online travel writing. Texts,
which are contemporary and Western-authored, are written either in English,
French and Italian and they all focus on China as the travel destination. Drawing
upon Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal’s studies on the narrative discourse, it is
contended that travel books and travel blogs, despite sharing basic generic features
(i.e. first-person travel accounts), present substantial differences. In the former,
readers are presented with a coherent and self-exhaustive narrative. This means that
the representation of both China and the traveller results as a progressive
(self)discovery. On the other hand, travel blogs provide fragmented and objectified
accounts rich in touristic tips. As a consequence, the narrative loses its internal
development and takes on an informative value in which the portrayal of China and
the traveller recede to the background.
Keywords: Narrative, travel writing, blogs, China, transmediality, Western texts

INTRODUCTION

By adopting a transmedial perspective, this article looks at similarities
and differences in the narrative of two differently mediated forms of
travel writing: travel books and travel blogs. Specifically, travel books
and travel blogs are regarded as two “intermedial transpositions” (Wolf,
2008) that realize the same generic matrix. In turn, the (contemporary)
travel writing genre can be defined as first-person narratives that
recount, with words and illustrations, journeys that effectively took place.
The present article focuses on Western-authored texts – in English,
French and Italian – that describe trips to contemporary China. On the
one hand, the decision to focus on texts in three different languages aims
at overcoming the English-centredness of the majority of study on blogs
(Schmidt 2007) and travel writing (Forsdick and Youngs, 2007). On the
other hand, the choice of China as the travel destination has two main
reasons. The first one is operative: given the medial diversity of these
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St. Calzati / Representations of China by Western Travellers in the Blogsphere

texts, it was necessary to find a unifying theme that could project over
the corpus of texts an overall coherence. Secondly, China is particularly
fruitful insofar as, for Westerners, it has always represented the
quintessential Otherness (Clarke, 1997). In this respect, the cultural and
linguistic gap that separates the travellers from China helps highlight the
cross-cultural potential of the narratives.
From these premises, this article aims at investigating how the
“landing” of travel narratives on different medial formats – i.e. the book
and the blog – is responsible for affecting the way in which the narrative
is shaped and the kind of information (about China and the traveller)
delivered by the texts. In order to do that, a narratological approach
inspired by Genette’s (1980) work on the narrative discourse is favoured.
At the same time, elaborating on Mieke Bal’s (2002) critique of orthodox
narratology (to which also Genette belongs), according to which we can
never think of a narrative as fully a-ideological, the conviction here is
that to assess the form of the narrative also leads to highlight the way in
which Self and Other – traveller and China – are represented and,
consequently, the ideological charge of the texts. To facilitate the
analysis, travel books are divided in monomodal and multimodal – the
former composed only by written text, the latter including also
illustrations – as for travel blogs, there are those hosed on platforms –
such as Travelpod.com and Turistipercaso.it – and individual ones,
which means that the blogger has created his/her own online space and
is fully responsible for its management.

THE LITERARY FORM OF TRAVEL BOOKS

According to Genette (1980) all narratives are a form of telling (diegesis).
This means that they necessarily imply a narrator and ultimately they can
only provide the illusion of mimesis (i.e. the “showing” of the event
compared to its telling). So, mimesis and diegesis are not two mutually
exclusive modes; rather, the narrative presents variations in its “mood”,
that is, the distance of the diegesis to the (mimesis of the) event. In
this article, particular attention is devoted to descriptions, personal
reflections, and dialogues (as the textual terrain where the encountered
between Self and Other is best displayed). Genette argues that the ways
in which dialogues are embedded in the narrative provides varying
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