Introduction: Looking

Literature is the art of language, so in the light of the profound influence of linguistic transformation on the development of modem Chinese literary forms it is appropriate to present the history of the development of modern Chinese literature as the art of language. Modern Chinese literature starts with the linguistic transformation of the May Fourth Movement’s rejection of classical Chinese and promotion of the vernacular. This language revolution and the transformation of literary language during each subsequent historical period have exerted a profound inf1uence on the overall development of modern Chinese literature, including literary forms, and hence have become an inner source of the development and evolution of modern Chinese literary forms and of the shaping of their main characteristics. An in-depth discussion of the interaction between linguistic transformation and the development of modern Chinese literary forms as well as the rules governing this process will not only disclose the universal linguistic context of literary creation created by the transformation of language but will also enable us to find the historical sources of the phenomena of literary genres and forms, writers’ choice of literary styles, the formal characteristics of literary works, etc., and will offer a correct explanation and evaluation of the May Fourth vernacular movement and the subsequent series of new literary forms and styles. This is instrumental to achieving a better summation of the experience and lessons of the development of modern Chinese literary forms and to finding historical clues to the development of our present-day literary forms.

How should creative writers, including HIV-negative writers, think through HIV as a livable illness? What is the potential for writing gay fiction in an era of ‘post-crisis’? This creative writing research draws links between literary modernism’s roots in crisis and the roots of contemporary gay realist fiction in the AIDS crisis. It suggests these origins place similar demands on writers to re-conceive elements of fiction. This paper, primarily, outlines challenges of representing HIV in contemporary fiction, and then suggests that contemporary HIV’s history of crisis provides ways to address these challenges, that the challenges may be productive. Because HIV in contemporary life is doubly invisible – viral loads may be undetectable, and the ongoing crisis can be understood as marginal or tactically historicised – aspects of creative writing after antiretrovirals exist in conversation with uncertainty, including elements that are otherwise put to representative use. By looking at some examples of post-crisis writing in contemporary gay realist fiction, the paper establishes the potential for HIV-positive representations to shift fiction-writing practice, bringing aspects of the novel such as time, metaphor and textual representation towards an aesthetics of post-crisis.

Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception

Book Review| December 01 2022 Review: On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China, by Emily Sun Emily Sun, On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 167. $115 cloth; $33 paper. Nan Z. Da Nan Z. Da Johns Hopkins University Nan Z. Da is Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (2018). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2022) 77 (2-3): 182–188. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2022.77.2-3.182 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nan Z. Da; Review: On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China, by Emily Sun. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2022; 77 (2-3): 182–188. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2022.77.2-3.182 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search When the colorized version of the 1902 film The Flying Train became available on Youtube and therefore available for viewing for most people, we in the twenty-first century were levered back into modernism’s alternate universe. When the colorized version of the 1909 film of Beijing at the end of the Qing dynasty became available as well, one could feel that order of magnitude shift at scale—at the right order of magnitude. That combined modernity, in the distinctive lighting and movements of the early-twentieth-century global cosmopolis, is tensing for an unhappy future in ways that Paul Saint-Amour has described of Anglo-European modernism, and also subtly, swiftly registering the imminent imperial showdowns, semantic and material, that Lydia Liu has described of modernism. Here is somewhere between the end of empire and the beginning of nationhood, a moment enfolded in poetic lyrics as new literary forms take hold. Colorized moving images can do... You do not currently have access to this content.

The New Culture Movement, particularly the May Fourth Movement in China, is known for its modernist spirit and advocacy for new literature. However, this focus on modernism often overlooks the continued relevance of traditional literature. This research explores the cultural tension between old and new literary movements during and after the May Fourth period. It highlights that both movements were driven by a strong sense of cultural confidence, as each sought to validate the ongoing importance of their respective traditions. The purpose of this study is to provide a nuanced understanding of the evolution of Chinese literature in the early 20th century, specifically focusing on how traditional culture continued to develop alongside new literary forms. The research addresses the problem of how traditional literary styles, particularly old-style poetry, not only survived but flourished despite the prominence of new literature, offering insights into broader cultural reconstruction efforts during that era.The research uses historical and literary analysis, focusing on published collections of old poems from China and overseas. It demonstrates that the old literary forms were resilient, continuing to grow even as new cultural movements surged.The study concludes that the old and new literary movements were not completely opposed. Instead, both contributed to the reconstruction of traditional culture, showing that the May Fourth Movement was not solely about rejecting tradition. Rather, it engaged in a dialogue between old and new cultural forces, each confident in its societal role. Theoretically, the research contributes to a reevaluation of the May Fourth Movement’s impact on Chinese culture. Practically, it underscores the importance of cultural continuity and heritage preservation in modernization, providing lessons for cultural policy today.

From Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics onward, tragedy has loomed large in the genealogy of literary theory. But this prominence is in many regards paradoxical. The original object of that theory, the Attic tragedies performed at the Dionysian festivals in 5th- century bce Athens, are, notwithstanding their ubiquitous representation on the modern stage, only a small fraction of the tragedies produced in Athens, and are themselves torn from their context of performance. The Poetics and the plays that served as its objects of analysis would long vanish from the purview of European culture. Yet, when they returned in the Renaissance as cultural monuments to be appropriated and repeated, it was in a context largely incommensurable with their existence in Ancient Greece. While the early moderns created their own poetics (and politics) of tragedy and enlisted their image of the Ancients in the invention of exquisitely modern literary and artistic forms (not least, opera), it was in the crucible of German Idealism and Romanticism, arguably the matrix of modern literary theory, that certain Ancient Greek tragedies were transmuted into models of “the tragic,” an idea that played a formative part in the emergence of philosophical modernity, accompanying a battle of the giants between dialectical (Hegelian) and antidialectical (Nietzschean) currents that continues to shape our theoretical present. The gap between a philosophy of the tragic and the poetics and history of tragedy as a dramatic genre is the site of much rich and provocative debate, in which the definition of literary theory itself is frequently at stake. Tragedy is in this sense usefully defined as a genre in conflict. It is also a genre of conflict, in the sense that ethical conflicts, historical transitions, and political revolutions have all come to define its literary forms, something that is particularly evident in the place of both tragedy and the tragic in the dramas of decolonization.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. The plays were seen not simply as the emergence of a new literary form but as a manifestation of modernity itself, transforming the stage into a site for the exploration of new ideas and ways of being, A Beggar's Art is the first book in English to examine the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama. Accompanying his study, M. Cody Poulton provides his translations of representative one-act plays. Poulton looks at the emergence of drama as a modern literary and artistic form and chronicles the creation of modern Japanese drama as a reaction to both traditional (particularly kabuki) dramaturgy and European drama. Following introductory essays on the development of Japanese drama from the 1880s to the early 1930s, are translations of nine seminal one-act plays by nine dramatists, (including two women): Akita Ujaku, Hasegawa Shigure, Izumi Kyōka, Kikuchi Kan, Kishida Kunio, Kubota Mantarō, Okada Yachiyo, Suzuki Senzaburō, and Tanaka Chika.

The earliest English writers left little comment on their literary forms. In contrast to the grammatical treatises of late antiquity or critical studies of contemporary and modern literature, early medieval English writing offers only sparse contemporaneous self-commentary, often in brief or conventional notes along the way to other things. But Old English and Latin literature had lively and evolving practices of literary form and formal innovation. Literary Form in Early Medieval England examines both more and lesser known forms, considering the multilingual landscape of early medieval England and showing that Old English literary forms do not simply end with the rupture of the Norman Conquest but continue in surprising ways. Literary Form in Early Medieval England offers a concise tour of what we do know of literary forms, both those that have received more attention and those that have been relatively overlooked, across the first six centuries of English literature.

The present paper seeks to address and examine the literary movements, trends, and schools in Kurdish literature, and to account for their true representations in Kurdish literary works. According to contemporary Kurdish literary historians, Kurdish literature before the era of the Renewal is referred to as the classical literature; Romanticism appeared simultaneously with the Renewal, and realism was manifested afterwards. Is it appropriate to refer to these trends and periods in the Kurdish context as classicism, romanticism, and realism? The present research argues that these terms applied to Kurdish literature were introduced into Kurdish letters and culture as the immediate result of the influence of European letters and trends. The central argument of this study is that Kurdish literary movements and the historical epochs assigned to them by the scholars are not the same as what is observed in the history of French and English literature. This study considers the whole body of Kurdish written literature into three distinct periods and sections that are the ancient literature, also called ‘the literature of Diwan’, from the beginning to the early twentieth century, ‘the literature of the renewal period’, from the 1900s to the mid twentieth century, and ‘the modern and contemporary literature’, from the 1960s to the present.

Jin He 金和 (1818–1885), a pioneering poet of mid-nineteenth century China, wrote in a colloquial style strongly influenced by the ballad tradition. Jin’s style was prose-like and broke all the structural limitations of earlier poetry in order to create formal innovations, while at the same time experimenting with new subject matter. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) and Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) considered Jin He and Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848–1905) to be the major poets of the nineteenth century. Jin had a major impact both on other late nineteenth-century poets and on the “Poetic Revolution” that led to the rise of modern Chinese literature. However, his verse has been largely ignored ever since. Among the most striking contributions Jin made to the literary transition in the nineteenth century was his innovation in presenting the female knight-errant 女俠 (nuxia). This invented image of the female knight-errant reflected a new tradition of women’s voices in the literary works of his time, and had a great impact on the representation of swordswomen in modern literature. This paper examines how the image of nuxia in Jin’s writing is distinct from those found in past poetry, how the female knight-errant in Jin’s works inverts conventional gender norms, and how Jin’s female knight-errant image is both connected with and distinct from those in other literary forms.

How might one begin to use energy as a critical component of cultural and literary analysis, especially within world-literary studies? Does making a link between a specific energy system and a previously defined literary period, movement or form open up a new way of analysing corresponding literary texts? This article argues that one of the most important reasons for reading energy into literature and, indeed, into the world-literary system is that it can provide us with critical and political resources we might otherwise lack. While we can imagine the modern period as an era shaped in relation to fossil fuels, the outcome of this periodization is different than we might think. Besides offering insights into the shape taken by literary form, what such a periodization also allows us to grapple with are the deep and complex ways in which energy has shaped the capacities, beliefs and practices of capitalist modernity.

"The eye altering, alters all." - Blake In his essay "How Culture Conditions the Colours We See," Umberto Eco claims that chromatic perception is determined by language. Regarding language as the primary modeling system, Eco argues for linguistic predominance over visual experience: ". . . the puzzle we are faced with is neither a psychological one nor an aesthetic one: it is a cultural one, and as such is filtered through a linguistic system" (159). Eco goes on to explain that he is 'very confused' about chromatic effect, and his arguments do a fine job of illustrating that confusion. To Eco's claim that color perception is determined by language, one can readily point out that both babies and animals, sans language, experience--and respond to--color perception. How then can color be only a cultural matter? Eco attempts to make a connection between the "negative concept" of a geopolitical unit (e.g., Holland or Italy defined by what is not Holland or Italy) and a chromatic system in which "units are defined not in themselves but in terms of opposition and position in relation to other units" (171). Culture, however, is not the only determinant in the opposition that defines certain colors: It is a physiological phenomenon that the eye, after staring at one color (for example, red) for a long time, will see that color's complement, its opposite (green), on a white background. Language is a frustrating tool when discussing color: languages throughout the world have only a limited number of words for the myriad color-sensations experienced by the average eye. Though language training and tradition have an undoubtedly profound effect on our color sense, our words for color constitute only one part of the color expression and not always the most important one. In his Remarks on Colour (1950-51), Wittgenstein observed: 'When we're asked 'What do the words 'red', 'blue', 'black', 'white' mean?' we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours,--but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further!' (I-68). We can never say with complete certainly that what this writer meant by this color (we are already in trouble) is understood by this reader (the woods are now officially burning). A brief foray into the world of color perception discloses that, first and foremost, a physiological process, not a cultural one, takes place when a person sees colors. In his lively Art & Physics (1991), Leonard Shlain observes that "Color is the subjective perception in our brains of an objective feature of light's specific wavelengths. Each aspect is inseparable from the other" (170). In his 1898 play To Damascus I, August Strindberg indicated specifically in a stage direction that the Mourners and Pallbearers were to be dressed in brown, while allowing the characters to defy what the audience saw and claim that they were wearing black. In what may well be the first instance of such dramatic toying with an audience's perception, Strindberg forces us to ask where colors exist: In the subject's eye or in the perceived object? In no other feature of the world does such an interplay exist between subject and object. Shlain notes that color "is both a subjective opinion and an objective feature of the world and is both an energy and an entity" (171). In the science of imaging (the transfer of one color digital image from one technology to another) recent research has suggested that human vision may be the best model for this process. Human vision is spatial: it views colors also as sensations involving relationships within an entire image. This phenomenon is part of the process of seeing and unique to the way humans see. In some ways color terms illustrate Roland Barthes's arguments (in S/Z) that connotation actually precedes denotation in language--possibly even produces what we normally consider a word's denotation. Barthes refers to denotation as 'the last of connotations' (9). Look up 'red' in the American Heritage Dictionary and the first definition you find is a comparison to 'blood.' Blood carries with it (or the reader brings to it) a number of connotations that have long inspired a tradition of associating red with life, sex, energy, etc. Perhaps the closest objective denotation for red is the mention of 'the long wavelength end of the spectrum,' which basically tells us nothing about experiencing the color red. Instead, the connotations of red, many of them based on previous perceptual experience, constitute our first encounter with the word 'red.' I would not be so inclined to apply Barthes's connotational hierarchy when one sees red in, say, a painting--an experience in which some of the subjectivity one brings to a color is more limited by the actual physical appearance of the hue chosen by the artist. Also, though Barthes talks about linguistic associations, colors are more inclined to inspire emotional associations which sometimes cannot be expressed in language. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement: 'The word blue designates, but it does not render' (162). Still, the 'pluralism' Barthes argues for in reading seems particularly present in the reader's encounter with color terms and their constant play of objectivity/subjectivity. In painting color was first released from the confines of form by the Post-Impressionists Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh, who allowed the color of the paint, the very marks on the canvas, to carry the power of expression. Following their lead, the French Fauve painters, under the auspices of Matisse, took the power of color another step further. Perhaps the greatest colorist of the twentieth century, Matisse understood that colors possess a harmony all their own--that colors call out for their complements; he used this knowledge to paint some of the most harmonious canvases in the history of art. 'I use the simplest colors,' Matisse wrote in 'The Path of Color' (1947). 'I don't transform them myself, it is the relationships that take care of that' (178). When he painted the Red Studio, for example, the real walls were actually a blue-gray; he later said that he 'felt red' in the room--and so he painted red (what he felt), leaving the observer to see red (what she feels). Other than its descriptive function, what does language have to do with any of this? It is a matter of perception and emotion. At a 1998 Seattle art gallery exhibit of predominantly monochromatic sculptures featuring icy white glass objects, I asked the artist why he had employed so little color in his work (there were two small pieces in colored glass and they were not as successful). He replied that "color has a tendency to get away from you," and so he had avoided it as much as possible. The fact that color has a power all its own, that the effects of chromaticism depend partially on how colors function beyond the associations applied to them, has long been acknowledged by more expressionistic artists. Writing to Emile Bernard in 1888, van Gogh proclaimed: 'I couldn't care less what the colors are in reality.' The pieces of the color puzzle which Umberto Eco wishes to dismiss, the psychological and the aesthetic, actually serve as the thrust of most pictorial and literary uses of color spaces. Toward the end of his essay, Eco bows to Klee, Mondrian, and Kandinsky (including even the poetry of Virgil) and their "artistic activity," which he views as working "against social codes and collective categorization" (175). Perhaps these artists and writers retrieved color from the deadening and sometimes restrictive effects of culture. Committed to the notion that the main function of color is expression, Matisse liberated color to abolish the sense of distance between the observer and the painting. His innovations are still baffling theorists: In Reconfiguring Modernism: Exploring the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature, Daniel R. Schwarz bemoans the difficulty in viewing Matisse's decorative productions in 'hermeneutical patterns' (149). Like Eco, Schwarz wants to replace perception and emotion with language and narrativity. Language may determine how we express the experience of color, but Eco places the cart before the horse if he actually believes that language 'determines' chromatic experience. Eco is not alone: the Cambridge linguist John Lyons, observing that color is 'not grammaticalised across the languages of the world as fully or centrally as shape, size, space, time' (223), concludes that colors are the product of language under the influence of culture. One is reminded of Goethe's remark that "the ox becomes furious if a red cloth is shown to him; but the philosopher, who speaks of color only in a general way, begins to rave" (xli). References Bachelard, Gaston. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Eco, Umberto. 'How Culture Conditions the Colours We See.' On Signs. Ed. M. Blonsky. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 157-75. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. The Theory of Colors. Trans. Charles Lock Eastlake. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1970. Lyons, John. 'Colour in Language.' Colour: Art & Science. Ed. Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 194-224. Matisse, Henri. Matisse on Art. Ed. Jack Flam. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California, 1995. Riley, Charles A., II. Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music and Psychology. Hanover: University Press of New

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature

Reviewed by: Architecture and Modern Literature by David Spurr Rita Sakr (bio) Architecture and Modern Literature, by David Spurr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. xi + 285 pp. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. David Spurr’s Architecture and Modern Literature is in many ways monumental. It opens with a statement of its aims and parameters as an exploration of “a series of instances in which architecture and modern literature come together in ways that appear to break down the barriers between the two art forms, or at least to construct bridges between them,” while investigating “the manner in which the relations between architecture and literature are symptomatic of modernity as a crisis of meaning” (3, 6). The project thus appears both conceptually broad and well defined while it achieves two specific intellectual feats. On the one hand, the study constructs bridges not merely between architecture and literature but rather more widely, if largely implicitly, across literature, architecture, urban studies, cultural geography, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, and modernist studies. Perhaps the author could have further clarified the different directions of this complex interdisciplinarity and made it a more explicit component of his work. Nevertheless, it could be argued that formulating these disciplinary intersections more elaborately would have made Spurr’s study too theoretically dense and less pleasurable to read than it is. Moreover, Architecture and Modern Literature displays not only a fascinating understanding of cultural forms and fields (ranging from Babel and The Odyssey to “junkspace” and “non-lieu” and passing through The Inferno and The Arcades Project1) but also an ability to weave together architectural theory, philosophical principles, psychoanalytical insights, seminal spatial/geographical thought, and close readings of literary works (novels, poetry, and some drama). On the other hand, this study ambitiously traces the vast cultural time-space of modernity and modern literature across two centuries, while projecting its own view of modern literature and architecture’s particular horizons and transformations. Seeking to explore an originary moment for modernity, Spurr argues that [a]mong the effects of an emerging modernity in this period [late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries] are a variety of manifestations that call both literary and architectural meanings into question. These include the aesthetic of the fragment, the value placed on subjective interiority, the significance given to the human body, the development of new materials and techniques, and a conception of the past in terms of stock or reserve. (28) It is hard to agree or disagree with the specific periodization of the [End Page 701] modern in literature and architecture proposed here because of the complex aesthetic and historical questions at stake. More interestingly, the parameters of intersecting transformations and concerns, as outlined in the “variety of manifestations” above, are very well substantiated in the book’s eight chapters. Referencing Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Le Corbusier among others, the first chapter shows that literature’s approaches to “dwelling” have gone through several stages: “nostalgia” in the nineteenth century gave way to a “narrative and rhetorical” release from that phase as “a new consciousness of urban space” emerges “finally to a renewed confrontation with the absence of dwelling, where modern writing strives to relieve the misery of homelessness by giving thought to it” (54, 54-55). This argument is developed through readings of Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. The comparisons among the modernists here are presented succinctly: “If architecture figures in Proust as a metaphor of inner desire, it figures in Joyce as the concrete embodiment of modernity itself. Ulysses is a work that gets its characters out of the house and into the street, where they are confronted not with dwelling in its domestic sense but with their existence in urban space, the very scene of modernity” (63). In this context, Spurr wisely advises us not to confuse literary modernism, by Joyce and Woolf especially, with the “utopian manifestos of modern architecture in particular” (66). These themes are linked in many ways to the seventh chapter in which Spurr presents a primarily Heideggerian reading of building, dwelling, ruins, and the void in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: prominent cultural-geographical topics that Spurr revisits with...

Many contributors to Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature’s 1963 special issue on J.D. Salinger found themselves dealing with the sticky fact that his writing after The Catcher in the Rye (1951) had grown increasingly unconventional and, for numerous readers, off-putting. In the lead essay, for example, Ihab Hassan focused on ‘‘certain peculiarities of form in these stories, a form that is so asymmetrical, so tolerant of chance and digression, as to warrant the name of antiform’’ (5). Salinger’s asymmetries and digressions were of interest to Hassan because they exemplified a ‘‘new conception of form, particularly suitable to their vision, which is becoming rife in current literature’’ (6). Although today any critical attention paid to Salinger is centered almost exclusively on The Catcher in the Rye, it is worth asking how his later work could be representative of a new antiform becoming ‘‘rife’’ in American literature. This later work is indeed significant because its digressive sensibility can be read as a response to the influence of New Critical attitudes toward narrative fiction, which held that to be successful, fiction must exhibit a unity (‘‘The sense of wholeness or oneness’’) which digression would disrupt (Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction 608). 1 Salinger’s aesthetic, on the other hand, emphasized that far from being a rhetorical device that merely distracts from the main point of the work, digression could be significant in and of itself. In fact, insofar as his highly digressive work disrupts the sense of unity described by the New Criticism, it encourages readers to re-evaluate how they assign meaning and significance in and for the work, a task that amounts to what I will term ethical work. In its interest in antiform more broadly and digression specifically, Salinger’s later work, dismissed though it has been by those critics working from New Critical standards of evaluation, actually anticipates the postmodern turn of the later 1960s and beyond. This essay first describes a New Critical Steven Belletto is assistant professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College. His essays on postwar American literature and culture have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, ELH, Clio, and Criticism. His book, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.