Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations by Author "Chan, Roy"

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    Living and Dying without a Care in the World: Twenty-first Century Sinophone Cinema’s Affective Attunement to the Growing Deficit Yet Enduring Feminization of Care
    (University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Lee, Kwan Yin; Chan, Roy
    This project asserts that recent Sinophone narrative films — Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011), Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013) and Oliver Chan’s Still Human (2018) — lauded for portraying domestic workers respectfully warrant critical attention not for their ostensibly progressive representations, but the affective resonance they create among middle-class viewers in response to the care deficit under neoliberal austerity. Rather than approaching the films as players in the realm of representational politics or international film festival circuits, my analysis attends to their affective registers, from what I term as reticent nostalgia to bearable awkwardness to tears of joy, as validation of and misgivings about the neoliberalism’s disregard for social reproductive needs unless they come with profit-making prospects. Without scrutinizing these texts’ promotion of acquiescence, albeit conflicted, to the privatization of and inequitable access to care, the transnational domestic work industry using Southeast Asian women of color and in poverty to ensure low-cost care for white-collar workers and their offsprings or those who have fallen through the cracks of the porous social safety net in East Asia would remain a well-oiled machine.
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    Paris by Way of the Moon: Translations of French Popular Fiction in Late-Qing China (1899-1912)
    (University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Moore, Robert; Chan, Roy
    During the final years of the Qing dynasty, works from outside of China were finding greater and greater popularity among Chinese readers, due in large part to the fact that translators altered them significantly. I confront the tendency of scholars who see these translations as either a betrayal of their source material or target readership by elevating the importance of the reader and source culture. By doing so, we see not only how the idea of fidelity in translation should work both to and from the translator, but also how source cultures were each translated differently. I focus on French works so as to demonstrate how French cultural authority in the 19th and early 20th centuries was preserved, but put into dialogue with traditional Chinese literary forms so as to both challenge and accommodate the Chinese reader simultaneously.