Running on Rooftops: a novel and critical reflection on writing from an identity of expatriation with an examination of West-meets-East encounters and attitudes depicted in literature

This thesis is in two parts: a creative work of fiction and a critical reflection on writing from an identity of expatriation. The creative work, a novel entitled Running on Rooftops, revolves around a fictitious community of expatriates living and working in China. As a new college graduate, Anne Henry, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, decides to spend a year teaching English in China. Twelve years later, though still unsure of how to make sense of the chain of events and encounters that left her with an X-shaped scar on her knee, she nevertheless tells the story, revealing how “just a year” can be anything but. The critical reflection, entitled Writing on Rooftops, explores the nature of expatriation as it relates to identity and writing, specifically in how West-meets-East encounters and attitudes are depicted in literature. In it, I examine the challenges and benefits of writing from an identity and mindset of expatriation as illustrated in the works of Western writers who themselves experienced and wrote from viewpoints of expatriation, particularly those Western writers who wrote of expatriation in China and Southeast Asia. The primary question addressed is how expatriation influences perception and how those perceptions among Western foreigners in China and Southeast Asia have been and can be reflected in literature. In the end, I argue that expatriation can be a valuable viewpoint to write from, offering new ways of seeing and describing our world, ourselves and the connections between the two.

Colour in English: from metonymy to metaphor

Colour words abound with figurative meanings, expressing much more than visual signals. Some of these figurative properties are well known; in English, for example, black is associated with EVIL and blue with DEPRESSION. Colours themselves are also described in metaphorical terms using lexis from other domains of experience, such as when we talk of deep blue, drawing on the domain of spatial position. Both metaphor and colour are of central concern to semantic theory; moreover, colour is recognised as a highly productive metaphoric field. Despite this, comparatively few works have dealt with these topics in unison, and even those few have tended to focus on Basic Colour Terms (BCTs) rather than including non-BCTs. This thesis addresses the need for an integrated study of both BCTs and non-BCTs, and provides an overview of metaphor and metonymy within the semantic area of colour. Conducted as part of the Mapping Metaphor project, this research uses the unique data source of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT) to identify areas of meaning that share vocabulary with colour and thus point to figurative uses. The lexicographic evidence is then compared to current language use, found in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA), to test for currency and further developments or changes in meaning. First, terms for saturation, tone and brightness are discussed. This lexis often functions as hue modifiers and is found to transfer into COLOUR from areas such as LIFE, EMOTION, TRUTH and MORALITY. The evidence for cross-modal links between COLOUR with SOUND, TOUCH and DIMENSION is then presented. Each BCT is discussed in turn, along with a selection of non-BCTs, where it is revealed how frequently hue terms engage in figurative meanings. This includes the secondary BCTs, with the only exception being orange, and a number of non-BCTs. All of the evidence discussed confirms that figurative uses of colour originate through a process of metonymy, although these are often extended into metaphor.