Abstract
The main methodological approaches of this study are comparing and contrasting of texts of contemporary Chinese children’s literature dealing with deafness. It first explores the historical background and social context in which people with deafness have been treated. Textual analysis then focuses on works of two very different philosophical concepts: Confucianism and Daoism. This paper argues that the dominant trend in these stories follows closely the traditional Confucian notion that literature is primarily informative and didactic, a tool serving social and moral purposes, and such literature has a transformative power to cure social ills: to improve society, children, including those with disabilities, must improve themselves first. The representative of this didactic trend is an autobiographical novel, If I Were Helen, which illustrates the author’s own experience, as a deaf girl, in attaining high academic achievement and social recognition. However, there is a smaller group of works advocating the ancient Chinese Daoist notion of seeking harmony with nature in their treatment of deafness. These stories highlight the constant conflict between a child’s innocence to take hearing and speaking impairments as “natural”, as against pressures to conform to the “normality” from the more “realistic” and “practical” adults. The deaf protagonists in Daoist influenced stories achieve peace in nature, for example, by having unvoiced conversations with animals, fairies and ghosts. As a pioneering study in the area, this paper attempts to attract more scholarly discussions on the neglected topic of disability in Chinese literary research.
Presenters
Lijun BiLecturer, School of Languages Literatures Cultures and Linguistics/Chinese Studies, Monash University, Victoria, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
DISABILITY IN CHINESE LITERATURE, DEAFNESS IN CHINESE CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
