Shi Zhecun Research Articles

The Writing of the Body in the Kumarajiva from the Imagery of the Sun

Across multiple civilizations, the sun has been for centuries considered an extremely prized cultural symbol with numerous connotations. In "Kumarajiva" by Shi Jincun, the sun is a recurring symbol that plays a significant role in the story's emotional transformation of the protagonist. Therefore, it is interesting to delve deeper into the meaning of this image. This essay aims to analyze the coexistence of the two suns in Kumarajiva, which represent human and buddhist nature, respectively, with their various cultural connotations. It also seeks to uncover the narrative idea of the supremacy of the body in the work by highlighting the rivalry and differences between the two suns. This paper aims to bridge the gap between the study of narrative and literary history by examining the similarities between the concept and the principle of neo-sensationalist creativity. It will also offer textual perspectives on the genre attribution of Shi Zhecun, a case that has garnered significant attention in literary history.

1930년대 한·중 심리소설 속 윤리의식 고찰 - ‘李箱’과 ‘施蟄存’을 중심으로 -

In this study, the problem of ethical consciousness of characters appearing in Lee Sang''s novel and Shi Zhou-chun''s psychological novel in the colonial space of ''Gyeongseong'' and ''Shanghai'' in the 1930s was investigated. In addition, considerations on literary ethics were also discussed. The two authors mainly expressed the plight of intellectuals as psychological conflict. In the 1930s, Gyeongseong and Shanghai were colonial and semi-colonial spaces of Korea and China in the modern period, and were spaces of oppression and a place where rational thinking was not easy. These two places have in common that they are a space where conflicts that were latent in the 1930s between humans and the environment, between humans and between humans and individuals exploded. Lee Sang and Shi Zhecun, who worked in Gyeongseong and Shanghai, respectively, are representative artists who portrayed the psychological wanderings and ethical conflicts of people in these environments. Through his novels, Lee Sang shows that the most important causes of the fall of mankind are the lack of communication, the lack of understanding of others, and the lack of character. On the other hand, the ethical consciousness in Shi Zhecun''s novel is not revealed directly on the surface of the work, but is secretly revealed through taboos that constitute the conflicting elements of the characters. The conflict over whether or not to keep the ethics of the eldest son in the family shown in the novel above, and the desire to deviate from the ethic of maintaining the chastity between husband and wife in the novel Shi Zhecun all require ethical choices. As a result of that choice, we face death as in the novel above, or return to our daily lives as in Shi Zhecun''s novel. Literature is not about judging whether an ethical choice was right or not. This is because literature essentially has a mission to seek freedom of the human mind and liberate it from ideological bondage.

施蛰存小说中现代男性心理构建研究

Shi Zhecun sharply analyzed the theory of modernism in the West and put the reality and emotions of contemporary era into the novel with his own original spirits. All of his pioneering novels are infused with his modern ideas. In this sense, Shi Zhecun is a pioneer in Chinese modernist literary thought. Shi Zhecun is also characterized by a keen sense of any object, and, especially, frankly describing a set of factual essences that arise in the process of psychological change in modern men. In his short stories there are a wide range of male modern psychology, such as unrestrained anxiety, the entzauberung from the feudal altar, and the broad minds which admire the beautiful city landscape and embrace both East and West cultures. Therefore, this paper examines the modern psychological aspects of the male characters in Shi Zhecun`s articles and attempts to analyze the essential causes of these modern psychological characteristics.

1930년대 한·중 심리소설 현대 남성 심리구조 비교연구 - 최명익과 스저춘을 중심으로

1930년대 한·중 심리소설 현대 남성 심리구조 비교연구 - 최명익과 스저춘을 중심으로

Poetry as Memoir: Shi Zhecun's Miscellaneous Poems of a Floating Life

Abstract At the age of eighty-five, writer Shi Zhecun 施蟄存 (1905–2003) recollected his long and difficult life journey in a poetic memoir, Fusheng zayong 浮生雜詠 (Miscellaneous Poems of a Floating Life). Comprising of eighty poems, this memoir focuses on the 1930s, when Shi experienced the first big storm of his life, a literary battle with the legendary writer Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936). As a result, Shi lost his “space for survival” in the Shanghai literary world, but fortunately his background in both modern and traditional education provided him with resilience. Indeed, one of the appeals of Shi's poetic memoir lies in the author's deliberate fusing of subtle/classical sentiments with public/modern concerns. As this article demonstrates, while Shi's poems embody an implicit metaphorical quality, his self-commentaries are often down-to-earth and self-referential, creating a tension between the two that allows the reader to have as much space for imagination as desired.

전통관습으로부터 여성 탈출 양상 비교연구 : 최명익의 「봄과 신작로」와 스저춘의 「봄 햇빛」을 중심으로

전통관습으로부터 여성 탈출 양상 비교연구 : 최명익의 「봄과 신작로」와 스저춘의 「봄 햇빛」을 중심으로

The Subversion of Modernity and Socialism in Mu Shiying’s Early Fiction

Mu Shiying’s first short story collection, North Pole, South Pole (Nanbeiji) from 1932, is usually seen as socialist or proletarian literature preceding his later modernist writings. I argue that this view needs to be revised. In one short story Mu deliberately parodies the social agenda of contemporary leftist writers. The protagonists are neither enlightened workers nor victims of social injustice. On the contrary, they turn to rage, misogyny, and self-righteous violence, and their motives are rooted in their sexual frustrations and inability to cope with modern life. Their righteous ideals are based on fiction and an imagined tradition. Mu’s construction of the fictive tradition plays an important part in these early short stories, and, in this respect, I compare them with Shi Zhecun’s writings.

Women Stereotypes in Shi Zhecun’s Short Stories

This article analyses the representation of women in two 1933 short story collections by Shi Zhecun: An Evening of Spring Rain and Exemplary Conduct of Virtuous Women. It discusses how the New Woman image was a site of contestation in Republican China, and argues that Shi Zhecun’s short stories contain four basic stereotypes: the enigmatic woman, the estranged wife, the prostitute, and the inhibited woman. Using these narratives of women and how they were perceived by men, Shi Zhecun deconstructed the New Woman image by subverting the various ways modernity was projected onto women.

Deliver Us from Evil: Faith and Fiction for Thomas Mann

Enlightenment paradigms of reason and progress have generally been as hostile to literary expressions of superstition, e.g., ghost stories, as they have been suspicious of statements of religious faith. Yet the indisputably enlightenment agenda of Marxism based its claims on a document, the Communist Manifesto, which commences with the rhetoric of the ghost story and the notorious “specter” that haunted Europe. Efforts to suppress narratives of ghosts and institutions of faith accompany the history of the Enlightenment so consistently as to suggest that the Enlightenment rationalization, trying to escape irrationality, simultaneously reproduces it. Rather than viewing ghost narratives as atavistic residues of a surpassed past, this paper explores the ongoing actuality of the supernatural in fiction. Proceeding from an urban ghost story by the Shanghai modernist Shi Zhecun, this essay turns to Thomas Mann: while Mann represents the liberal modern element in twentieth-century German prose, in fact it is frequently overlooked that the overwhelming majority of his mature texts draw on religious material and address religious questions: the Joseph novels, Doctor Faustus, and the Holy Sinner. This essay describes Thomas Mann’s path to questions of belief and transcendence, while also inquiring into the source of the extraordinary religious tilt in his choice of material for his late work.

Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China

�� This paper examines the cultural fi gures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China (1911–1949). In addition to refl ecting the anxieties arising from a changing gender ideology, these contending images reveal anxieties associated with the concept of modernity and the modern nation project. The New Woman represents a positive view of linear modernity and hopes for a strong future China. The Modern Girl manifests in two distinct ways: as a self-absorbed woman searching for subjectivity and as a dangerous femme fatale who devours the urban male. Both of these manifestations reveal deep anxieties over the alienation and loss that accompany modernity. Literary works by Ding Ling, Mao Dun, Shi Zhecun, and others reveal that the fi gures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl cross political and canonical lines. They can best be distinguished by their use in depicting the hopes, fears, pleasures, and dangers of modernity.

The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. By Shu-Mei Shih. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. xiii, 427 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Preface Introduction The Global and Local Terms of Chinese Modernism PART ONE: Desiring the Modern: May Fourth Occidentalism and Japanism 1. Time, Modernism, and Cultural Power: Local Constructions 2. Evolutionism and Experimentalism: Lu Xun and Tao Jingsun 3. Psychoanalysis and Cosmopolitanism: The Work of Guo Moruo 4. The Libidinal and the National: The Morality of Decadence in Yu Dafu, Teng Gu, and Others 5. Loving the Other: May Fourth Occidentalism in the Global Context PART TWO: Rethinking the Modern: The Beijing School 6. Modernity without Rupture: Proposals for a New Global Culture 7. Writing English with a Chinese Brush: The Work of Fei Ming 8. Gendered Negotiations with the Local: Lin Huiyin and Ling Shuhua PART THREE: Flaunting the Modern: Shanghai New Sensationism 9. Modernism and Urban Shanghai 10. Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape 11. Performing Semicolonial Subjectivity: The Work of Mu Shiying 12.Capitalism and Interiority: Shi Zhecun's Tales of the Erotic-Grotesque Conclusion Semicolonialism and Culture Appendix Later Modernisms: The War Years and Beyond Bibliography Index

The lure of the modern: writing modernism in semicolonial China, 1917-1937

Preface Introduction The Global and Local Terms of Chinese Modernism PART ONE: Desiring the Modern: May Fourth Occidentalism and Japanism 1. Time, Modernism, and Cultural Power: Local Constructions 2. Evolutionism and Experimentalism: Lu Xun and Tao Jingsun 3. Psychoanalysis and Cosmopolitanism: The Work of Guo Moruo 4. The Libidinal and the National: The Morality of Decadence in Yu Dafu, Teng Gu, and Others 5. Loving the Other: May Fourth Occidentalism in the Global Context PART TWO: Rethinking the Modern: The Beijing School 6. Modernity without Rupture: Proposals for a New Global Culture 7. Writing English with a Chinese Brush: The Work of Fei Ming 8. Gendered Negotiations with the Local: Lin Huiyin and Ling Shuhua PART THREE: Flaunting the Modern: Shanghai New Sensationism 9. Modernism and Urban Shanghai 10. Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape 11. Performing Semicolonial Subjectivity: The Work of Mu Shiying 12.Capitalism and Interiority: Shi Zhecun's Tales of the Erotic-Grotesque Conclusion Semicolonialism and Culture Appendix Later Modernisms: The War Years and Beyond Bibliography Index

Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 Yingjin Zhang (bio) Leo Ou-fan Lee . Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 416 pp. Hardcover $49.95, ISBN 0-6748-0550-x. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-6748-0551-8. This book is a much-anticipated major publication in the field of Chinese studies. As a leading scholar of modern Chinese literature and culture since the 1970s, Leo Ou-fan Lee has been defining the research agendas on Lu Xun, fictional realism, and cultural modernity, and now Shanghai Modern has been released to enthusiastic acclaim.1 Wen-hsin Yeh regards it as "cultural history from inside out and from ground up," while Charles Taylor judges it to be "immensely rich in theoretical insights" (back cover). In many ways, Shanghai Modern is neither groundbreaking (for scholarship on Shanghai has increased spectacularly since the 1980s) nor definitive (for many claims remain tentative or speculative), but is rather a work that brings together the cutting-edge research on urban modernity while directing the reader to explore further avenues. The book contains a wealth of primary information and [End Page 430] critical insights on a wide spectrum of what is called the "Shanghai modern." To illustrate this fascinating spectrum, Lee takes his reader on a tour through architectural styles, department stores, coffee houses, dance halls, public parks, the race club, movie theaters, and residential buildings, as well as popular magazines, textbooks and repositories (wenku), print advertisements, calendar posters, modern pictorials, motion pictures, foreign books, and literary writers and their fictional characters. As if dictated by these fascinating topics, Lee's narrative appears to steer away from consistent high theorization, and its rich descriptions and observations thus appeal to a general readership as well as an academic one. Part 1, "The Background of Urban Culture," consists of four chapters that survey Shanghai urban space, the "enlightenment" role of print culture, the rise of film culture as a new urban phenomenon, and the discovery by Shanghai writers—through books and journals—of Western modernism as "a new literary fashion with which to defy established conventions in Chinese literature, both past and present" (p. 146). In his film chapter,2 Lee takes note of the physical structure of movie theaters, the institutionalization of film reviews and criticism, the questions of popular taste and "Chinese" film narrative, and the relation of cinema to the city, as well as his observations on film spectatorship and film audience. "If print culture served as a crucial aid in this process of appropriating visuality," he contends, "the popularity of this visual medium soon triggered a reversed process—of the visual entering into the written and of film providing the key source for fictional technique" (p. 119). What is particularly refreshing in Lee's survey are the hitherto neglected interactions between print culture and film culture in Shanghai. In part 2, "The Modern Literary Imagination: Writers and Texts," Lee offers readings of six representative modernists—Shi Zhecun, Liu Na'ou, Mu Shiying, Shao Xunmei, Ye Lingfeng, and Eileen Chang—in both (inter)textual and (inter)- contextual terms. The four chapters in this part represent his attempt to correct a standard practice in Chinese-Western comparative literature. As he argues, "Scholars doing 'influence studies' of Western authors or works on modern Chinese literature normally choose to ignore this material context of how works by Western authors, whether in book form or included in journals, were actually located, read, translated or rendered into Chinese in some fashion, and consequently assimilated by the Chinese writers into their writing" (p. 122). In other words, Lee emphasizes the importance of materiality in any concrete case of cultural trafficking. Part 3, "Reflections," presents two chapters that trace the demise of Shanghai cosmopolitanism and its later-day reincarnation in Hong Kong. In a rather cursory fashion, Lee inventories historical and cultural events since the late 1930s and proposes that we envision Hong Kong as the Other of Shanghai and Shanghai as the Other of Hong Kong. Eileen Chang, whose "ghostly" images are [End Page 431] featured prominently in the last two of...