Manuscript and the Human in Modern China

Abstract

While the stylus, or handwriting instrument, is typically left out of narratives of technologization, this article details how manuscripts expressed modernity. By examining representations of pens and brushes in print media and cinema from the Republican and socialist eras, this article shows that the stylus served as a metonym for the changing status of the human in manuscript writing in the modern period. While earlier literary examples show that the brush and the human were understood to be commensurable, mutually resonant categories, rapid technological and political changes in the twentieth century led to increasing friction between the human and various forms of manuscript writing. This reevaluation of the relationship between writer and writing instrument began in the early twentieth century and resulted in anxiety over the introduction of mechanized forms of inscription into a human-centered writing process. Examples from Maoist cinema in the latter half of the twentieth century show the replacement of this anxiety with attempts to integrate manuscript writing into socialist modernity through the displacement of the writing subject.