Love and Shame: Transcultural Communication and Its Failure in Xiaolu Guo’s <i>A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers</i>

Authors

  • Eunju Hwang Department of English Sogang University Seoul, Korea

Keywords:

Love, shame, Xiaolu Guo, Transcultural communication, cosmopolitan subject

Abstract

This essay traces the transformation of Z in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers from a naïve Chinese peasant girl with blind faith in love to a cosmopolitan subject disillusioned with love. Her disillusionment results from her transnational relationship and her failed effort in transcultural communication during her stay in London for a year. Driven by her desire for complete understanding of her lover, she puts all her efforts into learning English; ironically, as her English improves, their relationship deteriorates. This essay illuminates the reasons for the failed communication from two different but related perspectives. The first part of the essay, informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on language and culture, locates the reason in Z’s incapability to act as an effective minister of her culture and her lover’s unwillingness to accept the arbitrariness of his culture and break out of its habitus. The second part of the essay, based on Silvan Tomkins’s theory of emotions, attempts to demonstrate how intimate feelings such as love and shame operate between the two lovers and how shame interrupts Z from communicating with her lover but also contributes to her newly acquired identity as Chinese in the global context.

Author Biography

Eunju Hwang, Department of English Sogang University Seoul, Korea

Eunju Hwang is Associate Professor of English at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from Purdue University. She teaches courses in modern and contemporary American fiction, American film, and literary theory and criticism. Her research interests include suburban studies, geocriticism, and American Gothic. She has published on American writers such as William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and Shirley Jackson. She recently published on Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People. She is currently working on Richard Matheson and the film adaptions of his work.

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Published

2013-07-05