Adrian Hsia

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adrian Hsia ( Chinese  夏瑞春 , Pinyin Xià Ruìchūn ; born November 25, 1938 in Chongqing , Republic of China ; † November 22, 2010 Montreal , Québec , Canada ) was a Chinese literary scholar, German studies and English studies specialist who is particularly concerned with cultural transformation and transfer processes employed in the literature of China and Europe. He was involved in the Asian German Studies .

Life

After attending school in Chongqing, Hong Kong and Jakarta in Indonesia , Adrian Hsia began studying English and German literature, sociology and sinology at the University of Cologne in Germany in 1957 . In 1962 he continued his studies at the Free University of Berlin continued where he in 1965 with a dissertation on the short stories by DH Lawrence for a doctorate to Dr. phil. completed. This was followed by a year of study in Basel . After three years as a lecturer for German and English at the University of Cologne, he moved to McGill University in Montreal in 1968 , where he held various positions, from 1998 as a full professor at the Institute for German Studies until his retirement in 2007. After illness, Hsia died unexpectedly in November 2010 in Montreal.

Research fields

Chinese Cultural Revolution

In the first scientific publication after his dissertation, Hsia examined the political and social developments in his homeland in the second half of the 1960s in "The Chinese Cultural Revolution ". In it he worked out the forerunner, the trigger, the cultural revolution, i.e. the contradictions in the interpretative sovereignty over the ideological foundations of communist development. He explored the role of the various protagonists of the period, such as the communist party , the youth, the red guards , the workers and peasants and the intellectuals . He analyzed the importance of the prevailing ideology, Maoism, as the basis for the Cultural Revolution. "The Chinese Cultural Revolution" is still one of the standard works for a profound understanding of this period, which has shaped the People's Republic of China to this day, even though the Cultural Revolution had only just reached its climax at the time of publication.

Hermann Hesse and China

In his most influential work “ Hermann Hesse und China” from 1974, Hsia showed by way of example several works by Hesse, including Damien , Siddharta , Der Steppenwolf , Narcissus and Goldmund and Das Glasperlenspiel , how his engagement with the philosophy of China influenced his thinking and literary work. In the first part of the book, Hsia followed how Hesse, the son of a Protestant missionary, found his way from the idyllic Baden small town via Indian to Chinese philosophy before he traveled with a friend to back India in 1911 and made his own encounters with the Asian cultural sphere. It becomes clear, however, that Hesse's image of China was very alienated, as on his trip he only met Chinese overseas who were trying to maintain a level of Chinese culture that might no longer exist in China at that time. Hsia made it clear that Hesse had found in Chinese philosophy what he lacked in Indian. Hsia attributed this to the fact that Hesse's view of Chinese philosophy, as opposed to Indian philosophy, was only that of a consumer and lacked any critical distance. Hsia also described influences and developments in Hesse's engagement with the philosophy of China, such as his initial enthusiasm for Buddhism , which later turned to Confucianism . In the second part, Hsia analyzed how Hesse processed the insights he gained from Chinese philosophy in his works. Hsia prepared a separate analysis for each of Hesse's works in which he discovered elements of Chinese philosophy. Numerous scientific collaborations and projects resulted from this work. In the extended new edition of the 2nd edition from 2002, Hsia added a chapter about the reception of Hesse in Taiwan in order to trace the bridge back to China. In the same year he was a founding member of the international Hermann-Hesse-Gesellschaft e. V. in Calw . in whose journal he later published several articles.

Image of China in European literature

In the 1980s and 1990s, Hsia expanded his research spectrum to include all of Central European and English literature and examined how China as a cultural phenomenon was reflected in European literature. He realized that over the centuries there had been several decisive changes in the picture that the great authors of Europe had painted of China, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Hegel and Kant to writers of the 20th century, such as B. Hesse and Kafka . Hsia placed a central point of this research on the Chinese play Zhao shi gu'er de da baochou赵氏孤儿 的 大 报仇 (The great revenge of the orphan of the Zhao family) from the time of the Chinese Yuan dynasty . He followed how the play was adapted several times in Europe and relocated to different locations, from China as in Voltaire in 1753, via India as in Christoph Martin Wieland in 1772, to Greece as in Goethe's unfinished drama fragment "Elpenor" 1783 For Hsia it is becoming increasingly clear that the images with which the European authors described China, whether positive or negative, had little in common with real China in their time and China more as a projection surface for one's own ideals and criticism of one's own society and thus as a means served for self-reflection. According to Hsia, what all descriptions of China have in common is that such a China would never have actually existed, but that the descriptions were only elements of a cultural construction or a vision of China. In order to clarify the difference between the real China and the entirety of the China images, he summarized the latter under the term "Sinism" (or Sinism in English). His definition of "Sinism" was based on Orientalism , of which he showed that it combines with the Orient , in which China is also placed, an agglomerate of cultures that are ascribed to similar character traits, but which do not exist and therefore the Orient is simply a "non-identity". In order to free China from this, he introduced the term "Chinesien" (or "Chinesia" in English) to illustrate how arbitrary the Chinese construct of European literature is. Europe was shaped by these images of China in many ways, especially during the Enlightenment . Hsia believed that modern European intellectual history would be unthinkable without dealing with real or fictional China. In order to give the reader an overall impression of these influences, in 2010 Hsia published his complete scientific work “Pictures of China in European Literature”, in which he compiled the results of all English and German-language publications on the European picture of China in one volume.

Works (selection)

  • DH Lawrence, The characters of his short stories in plot and tension. (also dissertation at the University of Cologne, 1965), Bouvier, Cologne 1968.
  • The Chinese Cultural Revolution. To develop the contradictions in Chinese society. Luchterhand, Neuwied and Berlin 1971.
  • Hermann Hesse and China. Presentation, materials and interpretations. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1974.
  • [Ed.] Hermann Hesse in the mirror of contemporary criticism. Bern and Munich: Francke, 1975.
  • [Ed.] Hermann Hesse today. Bonn: Bouvier, 1980.
  • [Ed.] German thinkers on China. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1985, out of print. Newly published as eBook 2018 by WandTiger Verlag.
  • [Ed.] Kafka and China. Bern et al .: Peter Lang, 1996.
  • Chinesia: The European Construction of China in the Literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Communicatio, studies on European literature and cultural history 16. Tübingen: Niemayer, 1998.
  • [Ed.] The Vision of China in the English Literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998.
  • Images of China in European Literature. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010.

literature

  • Ruppin, Jens Christof, That even in the foreign - In memory of Adrian Hsia, in: König, Christoph and Lepper, Marcel [ed.], History of German Studies. Announcements 2012 41/42, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012, pp. 109–115.
  • Schmitz-Emans, Monika [ed.], Transcultural Reception and Construction. Festschrift for Adrian Hsia, Heidelberg: Syncron, 2004.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary, The Gazette , dated November 29, 2010 , obituary for Adrian Hsia
  2. Schmitz-Emans, Monika [ed.], Transcultural Reception and Construction. Festschrift for Adrian Hsia, Heidelberg: Syncron, 2004, pp. 204–205.
  3. Hsia, Adrian, The Chinese Cultural Revolution. To develop the contradictions in Chinese society. Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1971, pp. 12–40.
  4. Hsia, Adrian, The Chinese Cultural Revolution. To develop the contradictions in Chinese society. Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1971, pp. 41–248.
  5. Hsia, Adrian, The Chinese Cultural Revolution. To develop the contradictions in Chinese society. Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1971, pp. 248–266.
  6. Hsia, Adrian, Hermann Hesse and (the not so distant) Asia, in: Hermann-Hesse-Jahrbuch, Vol. 1, ed. by Mauro Ponzi on behalf of the International Hermann Hesse Society, Tübingen 2004, p. 22.
  7. Hsia, Adrian, Hermann Hesse and the oriental literature, in: Hermann Hesse Heute, ed. by Adrian Hsia, Bonn 1980, p. 70.
  8. ^ Hsia, Adrian, Hermann Hesse and China. Presentation, materials and interpretations. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1974, pp. 9-150.
  9. ^ Hsia, Adrian, Hermann Hesse and China. Presentation, materials and interpretations. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1974, pp. 151-319.
  10. Hsia, Adrian, Chinesia: The European Construction of China in the Literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries, Vol. 16 of the series "Communicatio, Studies on European Literature and Cultural History", Tübingen: Niemayer, 1998, pp. 88–91.
  11. Hsia, Adrian, Chinesia: The European Construction of China in the Literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries, Volume 16 of the series "Communicatio, studies of European literature and culture history," Tuebingen. Niemayer, 1998, pp 7-16.
  12. Hsia, Adrian, China as Ethical Constructor and Reflector of Europe's Self-Perception: A Historical Survey up to Kafka's Time, in: Hsia, Adrian, [Ed.], Kafka and China, Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 1996, p. 5.