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Constructing Chinese History: Kafka's and Dittmar's Orientalist Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rolf J. Goebel
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Abstract

When read in the context of the European discourse on China since the Enlightenment, Kafka's “Constructing the Great Wall of China” (1917) and one of its likely sources, Dittmar's travelogue In New China (1912), reveal their political and cultural significance as early-twentieth-century conceptualizations of China during the late Ch'ing dynasty. Caught in the conflict between empirical observation and textual preconceptions, Dittmar manipulates orientalist discourse in his colonialist construction of Chinese progress guided by the Western powers. Surpassing his precursor in self-reflective insight into the rhetoricity of orientalism, Kafka appropriates the recurrent topoi of this field for an ironic exploration of the interactions among power, language, and sociopolitical stagnation. Kafka's story can be read as an intertextual subversion of Dittmar's Eurocentric ideology, as a response to the shattered hopes for revolutionary change after the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty, and as a critique of orientalist discourse in general. (RJG)

Type
Special Topic: Literature and the Idea of Europe
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 1: Special Topic Literature and the Idea of Europe , January 1993 , pp. 59 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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