The Chinese Perspective and the Assessment of Contemporary Chinese Literature

Abstract

Chen Xiaoming, one of China's leading literary critics and Beijing University professor, argues the need for a distinctly Chinese assessment of modern Chinese literature. Clearly positioning himself against critics like Wolfgang Kubin, Chen argues that China is presently enjoying a golden age of literary production, yet its innovative riches cannot be properly understood through Western literary theory, tastes, and trends, and therefore have gone largely unnoticed. These riches include a five-thousand-year national history vastly different from that of the West and writings in non-Western languages that cannot be properly evaluated based on Western linguistic aesthetics. Chen posits that literature cannot be properly assessed through translation, but must be subjected to criteria drawn from Chinese linguistic, aesthetic, and historical particulars.