Abstract

GRANDIS, Mario de. According to the Reader: A Semiotic Approach to the Study of Shaoshu Minzu Wenxue. Estud. Asia Áfr. [online]. 2023, vol.58, n.2, pp.215-242.  Epub June 26, 2023. ISSN 2448-654X.  https://doi.org/10.24201/eaa.v58i2.2740.

The notion of “ethnic minority literature” is well establi-shed in Chinese literary studies. According to the standard definition, ethnic minority literature must be authored by a member of an ethnic minority and must reflect that specific minority’s modes of life. This definition hinges on the analysis of the author’s ethnicity and on the themes of his/her writing, thus ignoring the role of the reader in the process of literary interpretation. To fill this gap, this study asks what makes a text “ethnic” from the perspective of the model reader, the hypothetical person who is the target audience of a literary text. Taking five texts by contemporary Chinese authors as case studies, this article suggests that the content of a literary text-not the author’s ethnicity-determines whether a text is perceived as “ethnic”. For this reason, the article introduces the notion of “literature about ethnic minorities” as a tool of literary analysis that allows foregrounding modes of literary expression such as language use and literary themes rather than ethnic administrative categories.

Keywords : ethnic literature; post-Mao literature; model reader; modern Chinese literature; ethnic minorities.

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