Fictional Dictionaries : Power and Philosophy of Language in Contemporary Chinese Fiction
This essay compares Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao, Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words, and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers from the perspective of philosophy of language. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, Zhuangzi’s therapeutic skepticism and J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, the essay includes analyses of propaganda as linguistic magic,