EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 62 Ceresa Marco (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) Turandot and her Sisters: China on the Italian Opera Stage Key words: China, Italian Opera, Turandot This paper examines the representation of China in Italian opera from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Beginning in the eighteenth century, works set in China became very fashionable in Italian spoken and musical drama, Antonio Vivaldi’s Il Teuzzone (1719) being one of the earliest and the most notable examples. This trend culminated in Giaco mo Puccini’s Turandot (1926), a veritable exercise in Orientalism on all levels: textual, visual and musical. This paper focuses specifically on libretti and their intertextual references to other literary works, from both Chinese and other literary traditions. Libretti, such as that to Puccini’s Turandot, are analyzed as texts produced in a variety of interrelated cultural contexts: the general European fascination with China; the taste for exotica; the tradition of chinoiserie; Enlightenment ideologies; colonialism, nationalism, Orientalism; in addition to, of course, developments in Italian literary, theatrical, and operatic domains. Italian authors appropriated prevailing notions about China and adapted them to the conventions of a genre already well established and widely popular, at the same time deterritorializing them and often using them for local purposes, far removed from questions of contemporary China vs. the West, and from nationalist or colonialist projects. Chen Hsiang-Yin (Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica) FromThe Lower Depths to Sunrise: The Performance of Class Consciousness in Cosmopolitan Theaters and Transcultural Practices Key words: Gorky, The Lower Depths, Sunrise, Cao Yu, Akira Kurosawa This paper focuses on Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902) and investigates why this drama was so prevail- ing and adapted for film in not only Soviet Russia, but also Japan, France and particularly China in the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, my research shows how this Russian work had been translated into the three above-mentioned foreign languages before its film adaptations, explaining that the ideals of class consciousness of Russian revolution were widely translated and transmitted under the cover of the literary phenomenon of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that the Chinese translation of The Lower Depths stimulated Cao Yu to create his play Sunrise (1936), both of which were often performed on the stage in Yan’an. The first part of this paper will show how Gorky performs himself as a proletariat in his real life and projects his “self” in this play, arguing that class consciousness in fact can be altered via performances. The next section will juxtapose the texts (including translations and film adaptations) and provide a comparative analysis of Gorky, Minoru Murata, Jean Renoir, Ke Ling, Huang Zuolin and Akira Kurosawa, in order to demonstrate how class consciousness is performed in transcultural practices and eventually win over public identification of the leftist ideology. The final part compares The Lower Depths with Sunrise, analysing how Cao Yu learned from Gorky and cultivated his own understand- ing of class struggle in his play, and showing the cultural difference between Russian and Chinese leftist ideologies.