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Abstract
This study is an effort to join the dialogue concerning the topic of Chinese allegory, a topic that was first discussed in the 1970s by Andrew Plaks, when Chinese literature began to be examined comparatively in American academia, and has since been developed by comparatists such as Stephen Owen, Pauline Yu, Longxi Zhang, and Haun Saussy. While Plaks, Owen, and Yu propose a theory in which the Chinese sense of allegory stands in opposition to its Western counterpart, I argue in the first chapter that such a Chinese alternative constitutes only a line of thought in Chinese poetics. Indebted to the Daoist monistic vision, this line of Chinese poetics, furthermore, bears interesting resemblance to the Western symbolist aesthetics, whose postulated superiority was deconstructed by Paul de Man in the late 1960s. With the consideration of the theory of Chinese allegory, the remainder of the chapters focuses on allegoresis and poetics of the 1592 vernacular prose-fiction the Journey to the West. While the dissertations second chapter, How Fiction Became a Sacred Scripture, chronicles the first three hundred years of evolution of allegoresis advanced in the Journeys series of commentary editions, its third chapter, Reading the Oppositional in Narrative, examines the two conflicting tendencies in reading the Journey during the course of the 20th century. Studying Hu Shihs 1921 prefatory dismissal of the theological interpretation, and the theological approach that has been revived by Anthony C. Yu and Andrew Plaks since the late 1970s, the third chapter also connects these two opposing modes in reading the Journey with the conflicting ways in reading European early modern texts such as the Divine Comedy, the Faerie Queene, and the Pilgrims Progress appearing in postwar American academia. As the second and third chapter, while tracing the four-hundred-year history of the Journey interpretations, are interested in tracking the motivations, both internal and external to the text of the Journey, for the theological allegoresis, the dissertations last chapter, Poetics and Interpretation of the Journey to the West, explores the Journeys recurring themes and use of rhetorical devices.