Nobel Laureates Bernard Shaw and Gao Xingjian

Abstract

Shaw, the Nobel laureate of Literature for 1925, has much in common with the 2000 Nobel laureate of Chinese ethnicity, Gao Xing-jian. The forces behind Shaw’s success are traced through an examination of the challenges Arthur Miller faced when directing Death of a Salesman in China, and when Gao Xingjian took his works into the global arenas. With Miller, the Chinese angle is literally an attempt to find parallels and an understanding from the Chinese side. The notion that there is a privileged Western angle relative to a Chinese angle kept being challenged. For Gao, the Chinese angle is a flexible cultural strategy that can be both generalized and personalized, subject to individual interpretations.