Research Poster Presentations
P OS T E R# 12
Digging to China: Chinese Representations in Italian Literature Jurandir Chan Faculty Mentor: Professor Paola Ureni Department of World Languages and Literatures People say that if we dig a deep hole straight down, we might come out in the other part of Earth, presumptuously China.The Orient is frequently represented as the opposite of the Occidental world for its geographical position as well as for its culture.The term “Orient” refers to Asian territories while “Occident” means a set of American and European nations that share a common social, economic, and cultural system. For this reason, the classification of whether a country belongs to the “Orient” or the “Occident” is not based solely on its geographical location, but also on its politics and traditions. Since the division between the Orient and Occident is profoundly complex, people conform to the generalization of these two terms with few or no regards to the imaginary line of their separation. The Orient is usually associated with exoticism by the ones in the Occident. Writers from the “West” constantly fulfill their lack of knowledge towards the mysterious East.The creation of a distorted Orient is evident from Marco Polo’s medieval travel descriptions reported in Il milione (1300) passing by the postmodernist writings such as Le città invisibili (1972) by Italo Calvino and it goes beyond contemporary works such as the novel Scontro di civiltà (2006) by Amara Lakhous.The novelty of the Orient provokes the authors’ use of imagination. This research illustrates how the Italian writers from different historical periods depict a fictionalized, stereotypical image of the Orient which might not coincide with reality.
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