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Tickell, Alex
(2023).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.0004
Abstract
This article analyses two of Xiaolu Guo’s works: her debut novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), and her most recent fiction, at the time of writing, A Lover’s Discourse (2020), and redresses a critical bias in readings of Guo’s creative engagement with language and translation by concentrating instead on Guo’s use of fragmentary ‘lexicographic’ form. I suggest that continental philosophy and critical theory provide an unexpected set of formal templates and intertexts for her work. I argue further that form and inter-textual suggestion allows Guo to play with ideas of synonymy, duplication, and concealed meaning, to articulate a sophisticated economic and political critique of her own situation as a migrant cultural producer in the global anglophone creative economy.