Modern Chinese Literature and World Literature from a European Perspective

Abstract

Modern Chinese Literature and World Literature from a European Perspective Theo D'haen (bio) I have pointed out in Concise Routledge History of World Literature that the main European languages and literatures have formed the core of what used to pass for Weltliteratur, notwithstanding the fact that Goethe first mentioned the term when reading a Chinese novel in translation (D'haen, Concise 1). Indeed, the 1911 book by Richard Green Moulton, World Literature and Its Place in General Education, the very first book on the subject in English, argues that world literature looks different according to one's particular native literature perspective. As he was English but taught in the United States, his intention was to trace the "literary pedigree" of the "English-speaking peoples." (Moulton v) As Moulton claims, world literature would be the "autobiography of civilization." However, we surmise that only what he deems to be of interest to the growth of Englishlanguage literature can contribute to such an "autobiography," a term that then appears not only as relative to English-language literature but truly absolute or universal. And then, of all the other literatures that have been linked to "major" civilizations, Moulton singles out the Chinese and Japanese as not having contributed anything to world literature. Obviously and happily, things have changed almost beyond recognition over the last forty years. These days, when I visit comparative literature departments in the US at higher-ranked universities, it is common to find graduate students studying non-European languages, and less who concentrate exclusively on European languages. The study of Chinese, language and literature, is one of the fields of study to have benefited from this most. This change of choices and preferences has to do with larger changes in the world, changes that have to do with geo-economics and geo-politics, with the diminished weight of Europe in [End Page 153] demographic, economic, and political importance after World War II, and with the vastly increased importance of especially China in all these respects. As far as the "American" situation is concerned, it has had to deal with demographic shifts, such as the growing weight of the Pacific states with their large and growing populations of East-Asian provenance and strategic decisions in the economic, political, and even military fields, which has compelled the US to direct its gaze towards the Pacific and away from the Atlantic. Though perhaps to a lesser or at least immediate degree, these same shifts manifest themselves in European academe, where attention to what happens in the United States, though still considerable, has certainly waned in favour of attention given to developments elsewhere, and particularly in East Asia. At the same time, interest in things Western, and particularly American, has greatly increased in China following Deng Xiaoping's 1978 Reform and Opening-Up of China. Specifically, in literary studies Western theory, almost invariably filtered through American academe, has set the tune for much, if not most, Chinese literary theory during the last few decades. Aspects of this have been the subject of recent issues of Neohelicon (vol. 46, 2019), MLQ (vol. 79, no. 3, September 2018), and the European Review (vol. 24, no. 2, May 2016), all of them edited or co-edited by Wang Ning. With the present issue of JML Wang Ning, along with his co-editor Peng Qinglong, continues in this same vein. The essays gathered in this JML issue foreground the interesting factor that Henrik Ibsen played a huge role in the renewal of Chinese literature in the first half of the twentieth century as well as the influence Russian, and later Soviet-Russian literature exerted during different parts of that same twentieth century. Ibsen was not an isolated exception. We are reminded of how China's most famous twentieth-century writer, Lu Xun, began by absorbing French, German, and English literature, translating novels by Jules Verne and reading Nietzsche, Walter Scott, Stuart Mill, and Harriet Beecher Stowe alongside Chinese writers introducing Western scientific ideas, and in the 1909 collection Fiction from Abroad (Yuwai xiaoshuo ji) he edited with his brother Zhou Zuoren also focused on Russian or East-European works that highlighted the plight of the oppressed and subjugated...