Międzykulturowa niedosłowność ptasiej symboliki w powieści Mo Yana „Obfite piersi, pełne biodra”
Intercultural Non-literality of the Bird Symbolics in Mo Yan’s „Big Breasts and Wide Hips”

Summary/Abstract: The article presents Mo Yan’s novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips as a text requiring from the Western audience what Roland Barthes defines as “exemplary reading”. In the novel, whose presented world is rooted in the Eastern philosophical order, a particular role is reserved for birds. Owing to its importance, the unique bird symbolism of Mo Yan’s work – sometimes deceptively similar to what Western readers might find familiar, yet, in fact, profoundly different – invites close reading. On this assumption, the author of the article attempts to highlight the role of hybrid bird-human characters in Mo Yan’s narrative in order to emphasize the significance of surprising transitions: in the novel, birds and people are forms of existence that smoothly flow into each other, and thus legitimize questions of ethical nature. The semiotic richness of the bird symbolism in Mo Yan’s novel emerges with particular energy in the context of cross-cultural analyses: both those concerning the coexistence of various cultural discourses in the fabric of the text itself, and those sensitive to the cultural roots of the researcher’s preconceptions.

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