托尼·莫里森在中国的批评与接受

点击上方“外国文学研究”可以订阅哦

编者按：诺贝尔文学奖得主、美国著名非裔女作家托尼·莫里森（Toni Morrison）于当地时间8月5日晚在纽约蒙蒂菲奥里医疗中心去世，享年88岁。莫里森1931年出生于美国俄亥俄州的小城洛雷恩。从康奈尔大学毕业后，莫里森进入大学任教，并在此期间开始她的文学创作。莫里森一生共创作11部小说，代表作包括《最蓝的眼睛》（The Bluest Eye），《所罗门之歌》（Song of Solomon）与《宠儿》（Beloved）等，她的作品情感炽热，简短而富有诗意，并以对美国黑人生活的敏锐观察闻名。托尼·莫里森于1993年荣膺诺贝尔文学奖，是第一位获此殊荣的美国非裔女作家。瑞典学院称她的小说“充满了想象的力量和流淌的诗意”，“为美国现实中至关重要的一面注入了生命力”。《外国文学研究》杂志曾发表过多篇关于莫里森其人其作的研究论文，本公众号从中精选两篇论文，推出“莫里森研究专辑”，以示纪念。

内容摘要

托尼·莫里森大致在20世纪80年代被译介到中国，从此这位非裔美国作家开始了在中国的“旅行”，并逐步成为中国学界研究的“宠儿”，有关她的评论和著述无论在数量还是在质量上都一直呈上升趋势。本文拟在现有研究的基础上，全面梳理三十多年来中国的莫里森研究，通过追踪横向、纵向的发展脉络，从译介出版、主题手法研究、理论探析和综述研究等方面中国学者对莫里森的批评与接受，认为中国莫里森研究既追随欧美研究步伐，也具有自己的特色，是与中国独特的历史文化语境密切相关的。

作者简介

杨金才，南京大学外国文学研究所教授，发表专著《美国文艺复兴经典作家的政治文化阐释》和大量学术论文，主要研究英美文学。本文系国家社会科学基金项目“当代美国小说的文化透视”[项目编号：09BWW014]的阶段性成果。

Title

Toni Morrison’s Critical Reception in China

Abstract

The reception of any author in a foreign culture is rarely a one-dimensional matter. The factors that predetermine and govern this reception, though sometimes a matter of chance, are intricately connected to the features of the receiving culture. In this sense, if we want to explain the way Toni Morrison and her works have found their place in Chinese culture, it will be necessary to consider the specific processes of development of the Chinese literary consciousness from the mid 1980s till now. There could be discerned two distinct sociocultural periods. Morrison’s reception in China has followed the national agenda of each of the two different periods of sociocultural development as well as the tastes and reading horizons of the audience.

Author

Yang Jincai is professor of English at the Institute of Foreign Literature, Nanjing University. He is author of American Renaissance Authors: A Political and Cultural Reading (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2009) and numerous critical essays on British and American literature. 

E-mail: [e-mail]

The first attempts to introduce Toni Morrison to China were made in the 1980s when China began to turn to the West for inspiration. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was widespread interest in Western literature of which American writers were highly acclaimed in China. For instance, in 1978 Dong Hengxun and his colleagues at the Institute of Foreign  Literature, Chinese  Academy of Social Sciences edited a book titled A Short History of American Literature^① in which Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London and many others were briefly introduced. Western modernist literature was also largely translated, allowing Chinese intellectuals at the time to access the aroma of Western literature. It was against such a background that Chinese literature revived soon after a decade of absence. 

Chinese literary scholars looked to the emergence of worldly renowned American writers as a model for the newly established Chinese literary circles. They introduced and wrote on American writers, giving rise to a booming translation of American literature. Dong Hengxun, Zhu Hong, Li Wenjun, Tao Jie, among many others, were extremely contributive to the study of American literature in China. It was in the 1980s that a cluster of modern and contemporary American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and John Updike were approached from various perspectives though still ideologically controlled by vulgar Marxism and the dogma of socio-realism learned from the former Soviet Union. However, no one can deny that the actual reciprocal relationship between Toni Morrison and China came along at that moment. In 1981, Morrison’s name first appeared in the Chinese leading journal Dushu (Reading) in which Dong Dingshan published his article titled “Recent Publications of Afro-American Writers,” briefly introducing her three novels Sula (1980), Tar Baby (1981) and Song of Solomon (1977). About five years later, Dong turned out a more scholarly paper “Double Shackles on Afro-American Women Writers” in which he offered a close reading of The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon and Sula, affirming a new surge of black writing embodied in Morrison’s fiction. According to Dong, Morrison does smartly well in projecting black women’s angst under the double oppression of both black men and white ones. In her novels, a black woman’s sexual life is often silhouetted by her society, race and psychic emotions. Dong then made a conclusion that “one has to consider not only a black woman’s life experience and living environment but also her gender and sex in order to understand Morrison’s fiction well” (143).^② It is worthy of note that Dong Dingshan’s observation of the deformed black sexuality and effects of slavery on individual black men and women is far insightful and should be merited as the best achievement in early Chinese perspectives on Toni Morrison. 

Nearly at the same time, Dong Hengxun published his second edition of A Short History of American Literature（1986）^③which carries a two page introduction to Morrison, giving a survey of her writing from The Bluest Eye to Tar Baby. Following this book appeared Hu Yunhuan’s scholarly essay titled “A Black Star—Approaching the African American Writer Toni Morrison” which is mainly a thematic study of Morrison’s fiction. His discussions of The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Song of Solomon and Sula are based on his own translations of these novels. ^④ Hu examined Morrison’s characterization, literary thought and writing style with reference to various themes concerned in these novels, paying particular attention to her meticulous delineation of scenes and characters. On the one hand, he tried to reveal how Morrison in these works exposes and censures the oppressive American society of racial discrimination; and on the other hand, he appreciated Morrison’s deft and skillful choice of words to generate a lyrical tone (242-43). Hu’s prefaces to his own translations of Morrison’s fiction also command attention, for they are characteristic of early Morrison studies in China. For instance, his preface to the Chinese version of Sula can be regarded as a scholarly work in which he not only approaches the construct of the image of Sula in the fiction but the significance of its narrative voice as well.^⑤  Hu is very good at exploring themes and artistic features of a novel. His “Foreword” to his translation of Song of Solomon is exemplarily well written, for it offers a detailed analysis of the novel besides his insightful remarks on how to handle the process of translation and difficulties he has overcome in transferring a message or an American slang. His keen observation of Morrison’s inheritance from African American literary tradition stands out, exerting a no small impact on later critics who would follow the same track (2-4, 7). Wang Youxuan is perhaps one of these followers who also composed a preface to his translation of Morrison’s Beloved (1987) in 1990. In the same vein, he starts from a close reading, probing the novel’s thematic concerns while conducting a character study of both Paul D and Sethe. What is particularly striking in the preface is Wang Youxuan’s critical statement that “Morrison’s Beloved is a brilliantly conceived story, exhibiting a far better combination of various narrative structures and techniques which help project the situation of African Americans in the 1980s in many ways paralleled that of the 1870s and 1880s” (Wang 7-8). For Wang, Beloved depicts the problems of the 1880s in terms applicable to the African American community of the 1980s and he lauds the novel’s reconfiguration of the slave narrative, perceiving it as a symbol of the collective ethnic power embodied in the blacks as a whole (9).

In 1988 when Toni Morrison received a Pulitzer Prize for his Beloved, a group of Chinese scholars began to examine her individual novels, giving rise to a cluster of essays published in various academic journals of which “A Critical Study of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye” by Wang Liyun is a case in point. It delves into the novel’s narrative structure, arguing that Morrison uses a complex blend of narration from both an omniscient narrator and a retrospective first-person narrator (146). In his discussion, Wang Liyun highly appraises Morrison’s interrogation of color issues in the American society where black people have to encounter discriminations from both the whites and mulattos (147). Exploration of this kind can also be found in Luo Xuanmin’s article on Beloved titled “Absurd Rationality and Rational Absurdity: On the Critical Consciousness of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” It addresses motherhood in the novel exploring Morrison’s critique of traditional attitudes toward motherhood as both confining and destructive and illustrating her humanist concerns in the novel (Luo 64-65). This type of criticism was soon expanded by critics such as Wang Jiaxiang and Tian Yaman who, instead of examining an individual novel, began to look into her several novels together, drawing a fairly more comprehensive perspective into Morrison. The former in her “A Glimpse at the Writing of Afro-American Woman Writer Toni Morrison” explores briefly one by one The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula and Tar Baby, bringing out one significant aspect of these novels, i.e., distorted life experiences of the blacks who were desperately searching for their cultural identity and self worth (Wang 78). Here is the quotation Wang Jiaxiang draws from Morrison that “fiction should be beautiful, and powerful, but it should also work. It should have something in it that enlightens; something in it that suggests what the conflicts are. But it need not solve those problems because it is not a case study, it is not a recipe” (86). In a similar way, Tian Yaman offers a book-length study of Morrison’s five novels: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, Beloved and Jazz, but it is a more scholarly undertaking, for Tian sees maternal love as a central idea that governs the five novels. She maintains that each of them embodies a depth of love that nourishes the growth of children (Tian 242-44). Despite her gloomy portrayal of racial conflicts, discrimination and various colored issues, Morrison is optimistic, Tian continues, and one can discern a ray of hope in her fiction, for she also displays her dutiful social responsibility as a writer (245). Besides, Chinese scholars also study Morrison with reference to her contemporaries, approaching main currents and major features that accompany the development of American literature in general. In such studies, Morrison’s works are observed as a special case in African American writing. A case in point is Shen Huihui’s article “Current Trends in American Literature” in which she devotes a few paragraphs to Morrison’s Beloved, analyzing its narrative features and appraising positive life attitudes of her protagonist (Shen 127-28).

What we may call the first wave of Chinese Morrison criticism—that which was produced in the 1980s and early 1990s—is actually twofold: on the one hand, it shows an appraisal of Morrison’s early works accompanied by translation prefaces and forewords; on the other hand, it focuses upon a restricted number of works and some critical themes. Very few Chinese scholars would then cite American scholarship while approaching Morrison. To a large extent, this double reading and the enormous difference between the translation of Morrison’s early works and the lengthy wait for translations and appraisals of her later novels is provoked or encouraged by the early critical reception of her work. This reception is exemplified by the publication of Wang Shouren’s longer paper “Out of the Shadow of the Past: A Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved” in the leading academic journal Foreign Literature Review in 1994 which goes beyond a mere textual analysis, marking a significant turn in Chinese Morrison scholarship. Here Wang starts to approach Beloved with reference to American scholarship on the novel and he quotes on several occasions from Karen Carmean’s book Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction to discuss the link between the past and the present in the novel and Morrison’s depiction of history and memory that yields a sense of ghostly obsession and possessiveness (38, 41, cf. Carmean 97). Wang’s idea that Beloved probes the most painful part of African American history coincidently envisions what Missy Dehn Kubitschek contends for in her guidance book Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion years later: 

Beloved continues the earlier exploration of themes such as the black community, motherhood, and the relationships between men and women. At the same time, it enlarges the scope of its investigation by exploring each theme in relation to escaping from slavery.” (Kubitschek 157)

Writing in 1995, Wang Shouren again examined Morrison’s interest in the cultural context in which Morrison weaves her fiction. For Wang Shouren, Morrison uses the settings in her Jazz to “reflect the history of the jazz movement, as well as address its extensive influence on the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s where there was a flowering of African American cultural, artistic, and intellectual awareness in Harlem, New York”(Wang 93). In his discussion, Wang Shouren draws attention to Morrison’s exploration of love in a world bereft of it. He speaks highly of her constant pursuit of love which he believes can ease and console the wounded heart of the black people and serve to reduce racial discrimination. He ends his argument by quoting from the novel: “That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me.” (emphasis in original, Morrison 229; Wang, 1995: 96) Wang’s observations on Morrison are thoughtful and of scholarly insight. Although he relies heavily on his close reading of Morrison’s work, Wang Shouren never addicts or confines himself to it. On many occasions, he moves beyond the limitations perceived in the Chinese traditional biographical approach fit for prefaces and forewords to translations and applies some aspect of theoretical perspectives such as the Marxist and cultural criticism to the analysis of Morrison’s fiction, leaving a far reaching impact on Morrison scholarship in China.

If observed from its concerns, Chinese scholarship on Morrison rendered a shift in 1994 which marked a new surge of Chinese interest in Morrison. ^⑥ Before that year, Chinese critics tended to focus their attention on introducing Toni Morrison and their critical approaches actually did not vary much, for many of them would start from a biographical search trying to show how Morrison’s personal history and life experience have integrated her writing. Here, we can find very similar critical views and an obvious link between Morrison and her fiction exemplified by the following essays such as “Great Women, Outstanding Writers: Introducing Female Laureates of Nobel Prize for Literature,” “Another Milestone in Afro-American Literature: On Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature,” and “An Unexpected Nobel Prize Winner: Toni Morrison and Her Writing.” ^⑦

From 1994 onwards, the reading of Morrison’s work in China changes in focus. It shows two trends: one offering an image of Morrison’s works as suiting an extended readership; the other understanding her literary thought, unique style of writing and their implications. Critical essays conducted thereby have displayed a multitude in both subject and perspective. Many scholars begin longing for a fresh approach, exploring the subtlety and multitude of Morrison’s oeuvres. They start to approach her later novels and various theoretical approaches have been employed to understand Morrison. As a result, there has come a heyday of Morrison criticism in China which we may call the second wave. Of special note is Wang Shouren and Wu Xinyun’s joint scholarly work known as Gender, Race and Culture—Toni Morrison and 20th Century African American Literature. It came in 1999 as the first Chinese book-length study on Morrison, marking a new phase of Morrison studies in China. Morrison, Wang and Wu argue, invokes a world of Harlem experiences such as addresses, rent parties, speakeasies, women’s clubs, and jazz music, in order to mark the great changes that have taken place since 1873. Wang and Wu highly recommend the novel, maintaining that Morrison’s Jazz illustrates the significant link between the jazz movement and the Harlem Renaissance. Their exploration of the novel’s narrative art also stands out, offering insightful remarks on the use of point of view, assorted features and modernist style in it. Here is their comment that “Morrison creates characters and plot lines that bring to light the history of the jazz movement” (Wang 22). There abounds in her Jazz, they continue, numerous voices, structured plot lines, improvised or disconnected sections, bold and poetical language, and sensual plot lines and imagery, “displaying her modern style that mirrors the composition of jazz music” (25). Here we can see Wang and Wu have examined Morrison’s fiction strictly in line with a close look at black history, affirming Morrison’s cultural root and profundity of thought as a black writer and her enormous contribution to American literature (25). When speaking of her Beloved, they affirm that Morrison’s turn to black history in the 1980s and onwards is fundamentally striking, for she makes a significant shift in the novel from which “she begins to write history only” (145). Five years later, they published their revised edition of the book and renamed it as Gender, Race and Culture—Approaching Toni Morrison’s Fiction in 2004, adding a new chapter “New Reflections on Love” in which Morrison’s Love (2003) is handled with an emphasis on the novel’s narrative structure and employment of multiple points of view. One feels like going through a game of jigsaw when reading it, said Wang and Wu (Wang 2004: 197).

As a leading scholar of Morrison studies in China, Wang Shouren is reputed to have set up a path for Morrison scholarship characterized by a close reading with reference to specific theoretical perspectives. He knows well how to draw inspiration from American scholarship to enrich his research. Nearly all critics afterwards turn to either literary theories or American scholarship in particular when examining Morrison’s works. Among those who deftly apply specific theories are scholars such as Jiang Xinxin and Li Xifen, for they both adopt a feminist approach to Morrison’s work. The former turned out two very impressive essays: “The Construction of Afro-American Female Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (91-97) in 2002 and “Identity and Disintegration: Practicing Selfhood in Sula” (176-78) in 2005 while the latter’s “A Reconstruction of Afro-American Female Self: On the Narrative Strategy of Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’” is also well written for its pioneering and in-depth research on the story (96-99). However, the best scholarship counted in this field in the new century is Zhang Ruwen’s lengthy article “Feminine and Feminist Discourses in Song of Solomon” which delves into the novel’s resentful and resisting voices embodied in the character Corinthians (89). Zhang affirms Morrison’s portrayal of the black women’s resistance and challenge against the patriarchal society (85) and evaluates the vigor of black culture that nourishes the power of black women (90). Here Zhang occasionally turns to Michel Foucault and Dorothy Smith for theoretical inspiration and enhancement.

In this feminist approach, early critics paid close attention to the image of black Mammy which is believed to be emblematic, serving at least two purposes of both reflecting white women’s dreams and exposing the harsh realities of black women. It is the white women’s wish that black women could do heavy housework for them forever. In contrast with this white supremacy are the black women’s severe oppression and enslavement under which she displays various virtues such as diligence, kindness and perseverance (Zou 39).

Besides feminist criticism, cultural criticism also energized scholars during thelate 1990s and early 2000s. Scholars investigated the scope of Morrison’s imagination in the context of African American history with reference to 3 different cultures, namely American culture, black culture and women’s culture. Her literary precedents are explored. To what extent is Morrison intellectually embedded in her own time? And to what extent does she offer a cultural critique through her fictions?

Zeng Yanyu, for example, highlights Morrison’s indebtedness to black literary tradition, reiterating her position in rewriting African American literary history. Morrison, Zeng argues, is deeply rooted in her cultural background, knowing well how to combine history, myth and oral tradition to project the symbolic conduct of the black people. She quotes from Bernard W. Bell: “Thematically and structurally, therefore, from Brown to Reed, the tradition of the Afro-American novel is dominated by the struggle for freedom from all forms of oppression and by the personal odyssey to realize the full potential of one’s complex bicultural identity as an Afro-American”. (Zeng 47; Bell 341) In line with this trend of searching for connection between Morrison and African American literary tradition as well as her predecessors is a scholarly attempt to look into socio-historical themes in Morrison’s fiction. Efforts have been made to explore the boundaries between fiction and reality, and in particular, the relationship between the past and the present and the relationship between fiction, history and genealogy. For example, Wang Xiangyun in her “The Appeal for a Second Liberation in Beloved” discusses how Morrison’s Beloved rewrites shadows of the slavery past that African Americans have to survive. Many types of pathological misconduct and abnormality of the blacks, Wang argues, should be attributed to the malicious slavery system (67). She maintains that Morrison cultivates a traumatic history of the black Americans (69). A few more should also be counted among the best. Chen Fachun and Wang Xiujie respectively handle the issue of racism in Morrison’s novels. The former offers a thematic study of Paradise in which he observes it as a satirical text against American racism (Chen 77-79), while the latter mainly comments on the deformed motherhood derived from the ugly slavery system (Wang 159-60). Speaking about Morrison’s cultural integration and its significance, Wang Yukuo turned out his paper “Interpretation of Toni Morrison’s Cultural Stands” in 2006 in which he looks into Morrison’s Beloved and Paradise both textually and theoretically, arguing about her literary achievements of cultural integration and a cultural stance that goes beyond the boundaries of race and gender (106, 108-109). These efforts of multicultural undertaking render a wealth of scholarship that helps to understand Morrison’s writing in China.

Along with this multicultural reading are a group of essays fashioned by a theoretical perspective of narration. In such essays Morrison’s narrative art is carefully observed. The most scholarly efforts belong to those of university teachers. Professor Weng Lehong at China Foreign Affairs University, for example, perceives Beloved’s narrative strategy through character development, pointing out its narrative space in which characters develop relationships with Beloved (68-69). Her “Music as the Narrative Strategy: Reading Toni Morrison’s Jazz” is also highly merited for its detailed analysis of the narrative strategy in Jazz, focusing on the interaction between Jazz music and character development. Here, Weng reiterates a mix of techniques that Morrison has fused aspects of the traditional third-person omniscient narration, dialogue and direct presentation of the characters’ actions, foregrounding the unique function of Jazz music (53-54, 57). Du Weiping’s “Crying from Room 124: An Analysis of the Narrative Discourse in Beloved” written a year earlier should also be noted for its insightful observation on the symbolic significance of Room 124 as well as its dialogic features as a narrative voice in the novel (66-68). Similar remarks also appear in various ways in Hu Xiaoying’s “Narrative Discourse in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Gao Jihai’s “Narrative Features of Toni Morrison’s Novels,” and Du Zhiqing’s “An Analysis of the Postmodernist Narrative Characteristics in Sula.”

From the late 1990s on comparative studies of Morrison and his contemporaries as well as predecessors began to surface as part of Chinese Morrison scholarship. A cluster of scholarly papers published thereby juxtapose Morrison and a few other authors such as William Faulkner, Alice Walker and Gabriel García Márquez who have also been well known in China. The objectives of the scholars are however quite similar, all centering on a comparative analysis of the writing techniques in two different works. Foremost among critical exponents of this view is Xi Chuanjin’s “Magic Realism and Beloved” which explores a few features of magic realism in Morrison’s Beloved, arguing that the fiction begins with an intimate meeting of Paul D and Sethe after 18 years of separation and misery followed by a series of flashbacks. This type of writing, Xi continues, has a trace of magic realism, but Morrison, instead of imitating it, actually develops the skill and displays her novelty in relocating the ghost story in climactic scenes (106, 108). In a similar fashion, Tian Xiangbin further explores Morrison’s magic realistic features, resulting in his “Two Works of Magnificence from South and North Americas: On the Success of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon” which examines these novels from a comparative perspective. Here Tian analyzes in detail the magic realistic features embodied in the presentation of supernatural elements brought from Africa by the black slaves in both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon, highlighting their differences in their projection of themes (86). He seems to affirm that Morrison’s employment of magic realism helps her reveal a type of complexity in African Americans and their fear and love in life (91). A few other scholars such as Zhang Ruwen and Hu Xiaoying have also offered their comparative studies of Morrison and Faulkner. The former compares Beloved with The Sound and the Fury mainly discussing Morrison’s possible inheritance from Faulkner (Zhang 132, 134), while the latter observes both similarities and differences in their thematic concerns, artistic features and projections of Southern American culture (Hu 22, 24, 26-27). Despite their innovative ideas and pioneering efforts, these scholars are quite similar in their approaches without referring to the rich American scholarship, say, the scholarly collection Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-envisioned co-edited by Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross and Judith Bryant Wittenberg. Obviously, comparative approaches to Morrison are still at a bourgeoning stage in China lacking in academic sophistication. But what follows is really exciting as far as the Chinese critical reception of Morrison is concerned. There has occurred a brisk publication of individual monographs on her in the past decade or so. 12 individual books have been published on Toni Morrison since the 2000s, many of which are in fact expanded versions of their doctoral dissertations in addition to a collection of critical essays titled Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Fiction. ^⑧This fruitful scholarship on Morrison reveals that Chinese critics have made a great deal of efforts in promoting Morrison in China. Their individual discussions are precise and useful in providing a gateway into Morrison’s fiction for both students and general readers who might not be familiar with her work. In these books, one can encounter various comprehensive analyses of the major writings and motifs of the African American woman writer.

Reception of Morrison in China shows a reading of the author which is not univocal. From the highly autobiographical reception, characterized first by Hu Yunhuan, who notes Morrison’s potential to be a “great culturally rooted African American writer”, to a more close reading of Morrison as a reflexive author, to a variety of theoretical perspectives and a fully fledged academic approach, the reception of Morrison in China has come full circle. A recently released paper titled “A Mercy and the Ideal Home under Construction” by Hu Jun is illustrative of this. It offers a new perspective into the novel, arguing that Morrison unfolds in it her thoughtful reflection on the United States as a nation. Here, Hu contends that Morrison is not satisfied with the United States as an immigrant nation and interrogates provocatively the identity of American citizens, for she strongly believes American history does not belong to the Whites only, but to all races instead (202-03).

In terms of text selection and theoretical approaches Morrison studies in China in the 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s is quite varied. Chinese readers were not unanimous about Morrison during those periods of burgeoning interest, and ideology strongly influenced the reception of the African American author, whose humanistic values and art were sometimes totally misunderstood. This was of course the case in China in the 1980s when Chinese critics were still driven by the tenets of orthodox socio-realism. Many critics of the day were keen on how an American author exposed social evils in capitalist and racist America. Unexceptionally, they would approach racial discrimination and social oppression in Morrison’s fiction while her aesthetics was largely ignored. Not until the 1990s did Chinese scholars gradually give up their traditional mindset and begin to perceive Morrison as a literary artist. It is just this monumental change that has brought about an abundance of Morrison scholarship in China.

To conclude, I am pleased to release that the future of Morrison studies in China looks bright, for there are now widely published critics with a large readership of their own. Because of their interest, Morrison’s works become available in paperback editions for which they—, among others—have provided introductions. Morrison’s novels and stories become staples of college English classes. Graduate students write dissertations about her fiction and essays, and some of these graduate students take their places as professors, continuing their scholarship and training others. Among these dissertation writers are Weng Lehong (Professor of English at China Foreign Affairs University), Wang Yukuo (Professor of English at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications), and Chen Fachun (Professor of English at at Tianjin University of International Studies, to name only a few), each of whom has become a noted Morrison scholar. Through the efforts of Chinese critics, for about 30 years at least, Morrison has enjoyed the popular acclaim that she might have never expected in China.

责任编辑：四  维

此文原载于《外国文学研究》2011年第4期

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