Study Of Chinese Literature Research Articles

Translating Journals into Chinese: Toward a Theoretical (Re)Construction of Chinese Critical Discourse

Translation has played a very important role in Chinese literature, theory, and criticism. Modern Chinese literature is almost a translated literature, for, through a sort of cultural translation, traditional Chinese literary and critical discourse was deconstructed and has manifested itself in a new form. But translating Western journals into Chinese is only a recent practice, adopted since the turn of the century, because Chinese theorists realize that many insightful theoretical concepts and ideas first appear in journal articles. The article lays more emphasis on why Chinese scholars take the initiative of translating some leading Western humanities journals, such as New Literary History, Critical Inquiry and boundary 2, into Chinese. To the author, founded earliest among all the three above-mentioned and having close relations with Chinese literary scholarship, New Literary History most strongly influences Chinese scholars' literary study and critical thinking. And its academic norms and strict selection of manuscripts have certainly set a fine example in China's literary study and theory and criticism as well as the editing of journals of literary and cultural studies in the Chinese context. Chinese literary and cultural studies, due to the translation of these journals, will move closer and closer toward the international community, thereby having equal dialogues with the latter. Since most of the articles published in the above-mentioned journals anticipate their authors' substantial research and profound thinking of cutting-edge theoretical issues, they will certainly provide illumination to Chinese scholars' theoretical reflections. The article also points out that globalization has broken through the demarcation between nations and countries, and between center and periphery, with transnational corporations functioning as an "empire" everywhere. In this way, globalization has also benefited people who want to get out of their isolated domain, enabling them to communicate more effectively in such a "global village." It has therefore enabled Chinese scholars to more conveniently communicate with the international scholarship on any theoretical and academic topic, including literary and cultural studies. In today's context, they translate Western and international theoretical journals into Chinese, for the purpose of making China's literary and theoretical studies closer to the international community and allowing it to communicate more easily with the same. Maybe in the near future, when the Western and international colleagues want to know what has been going on in China's literary and cultural studies, and what new ideas we Chinese theorists have put forward, they will also start, in collaboration with their Western colleagues, to translate some excellent Chinese theoretical journals into the major Western and international language: English.

The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture Yiyan Wang (bio) Song Geng . The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. x, 256 pp. Hardcover $39.50, ISBN 962-209-620-4. The study of gender relations and forms of sexuality is an established field in Chinese studies, and van Gulik's pioneering Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1974) was among the earliest inquiries in this regard. However, for decades most of the publications in the field have focused primarily on the gender identity and living conditions of women. It was not until the mid-1990s that an investigation of masculine roles began, with a focus on literary representation. In premodern Chinese literary studies, there are Louise Edwards' Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream (Leiden: Brill, 1994) and Keith McMahon's Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). In contemporary Chinese literature there are Lu Tonglin's Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Zhong Xueping's Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). More recently, Kam Louie and Morris Low's edited volume, Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), offers a number of chapters on the literary representation of masculinity, and Ding Naifei explores sexual practice and sexuality in detail with her monograph Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Kam Louie's Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) also devotes a considerable amount of space to Chinese masculinity as manifested in fictional characters. The historical study on Chinese masculinity is a recent event, most noticeably beginning with the forum "Gender and Manhood in Chinese History" in American Historical Review (vol. 105, no. 5 [2000]) and Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom's edited volume, Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Song Geng's The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture is devoted to the study of effeminate male characters and their cultural connotations in premodern Chinese literature. He claims that his book is a "postcolonial reading of Chinese masculinity" (pp. 8-9), and his emphasis is on the differences in masculinity between China and the West in the time before colonialism and Westernization. Song considers the outstanding features of the premodern Chinese gender discourse to include the absence of male and female polarity, [End Page 554] the absence of mind-body duality, the presence of ungendered figures in Confucian classics, the presence of desexualized military heroes in popular fiction and drama, and the presence of the correlative "yin/yang" and wen/wu dichotomies (pp. 10-11). Noticeably, Song disagrees with Kam Louie on the significance of the notions of wen/wu in Chinese gender configuration. While Kam Louie considers wen/wu as fundamental in shaping Chinese masculinity, Song places strong emphasis on yin/yang, asserting that only when one acknowledges the essential role played by yin/yang in the Chinese perception of gender relations can one explain the effeminacy of men in Chinese literature and culture and understand the reasons why the fragile scholar has been held as an embodiment of the ideal male in Chinese culture (pp. 15-16). Song's study of Chinese masculinity is framed in the gender theories of Western thinkers, in particular those of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. He employs Foucaultian concepts of history, power, and sexuality in his reading of premodern Chinese texts. He positions his investigation in the postcolonial context and pays special attention to the distinctive quality of Chinese masculinity as a cultural practice with very different origins from that of the West. It is important to note that Song's reading of the yin/yang discourse is primarily Foucaultian in the sense that his study is centered on power politics and its subsequent determination of gender role by the positioning of the...

The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. By David Der-Wei Wang. [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. 402 pp. ISBN 0-520-23140-6.

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

Globalizing Chinese literature: toward a rewriting of contemporary Chinese literary culture

In the age of globalization, intellectuals, writers, critics and literary and cultural studies scholars cannot but take pains to conceive or picture the future orientation of elite literature since elite literature is being challenged by popular literature and culture, and literary studies by Cultural Studies. The present essay tries to describe a new orientation of Chinese literature studies, or more specifically, to observe modern Chinese literature in a broad context of world literature and reach a rewriting of contemporary Chinese literary culture from an international and comparative point of view. In reperiodizing modern Chinese literature, the author points out that in the global age, the new framework of world culture in the twenty-first century is characterized by different cultures coming to dialogue and merging to some degree rather than ‘cultural conflict’. With this broad background, twentieth century Chinese literature should be re-examined from an international and comparative perspective. The paper also points out that rewriting literary history must be associated with issues of canon formation and reformation, that is, to offer new interpretations from theoretical perspectives of canonical literary works. The author discusses several considerations involved in canon selection: reception and market success, recognition of critical circles, and inclusion in university curriculum.

Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century Paul B. Foster (bio) Bonnie S. McDougall . Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. ix, 281 pp. Hardcover $35.00, ISBN 962-996-029-x. This anthology of highly polished, previously published papers directly challenges the canonized status of China's twentieth-century works, authors, and audiences. McDougall presents a consistent, singularly harsh, but simultaneously subtle and convincing argument for a critical approach to modern Chinese literature that emphasizes the demystification of the process by which authors, their works, and the modern Chinese literary field in general are constructed. Refreshingly without recourse to literary-critical jargon, McDougall methodically reveals the politics of power and institution operating in symbiosis with self-censorship and Western sinological study to obscure truths about modern Chinese literature. She demonstrates that the resulting valorization of mediocre literary products and authors is a product of the Chinese intellectual's obsession with his own marginalization—his fall from privileged social status and power in a post-civil examination China. The construction of modern Chinese literature studies thus resulted in a "fictional [canonized] author" and an "imaginary [canonized] audience" that served to buttress the tenuous legitimacy of the very producers and consumers of the new literature since the May Fourth period. This theme provides the canvas that McDougall uses as she courageously interprets the broad-ranging issues in modern Chinese literature, including its fundamental validity and direction. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, "Authors, Audiences and Critics," examines "the role that critics and scholars in Western countries have played in the formation of the modern Chinese literary canon" (p. 8). Moreover, locating [End Page 425] the idealization and dramatization of authors' lives in the continuum of the role of "intellectual" descendent of the literati of dynastic times, McDougall makes a significant contribution to the study of modern Chinese literature by redirecting C. T. Hsia's famous "obsession with China" to demonstrate that it was not the discourse of nationalism or internationalism (the fate of China) with which intellectuals and writers were primarily concerned, but, in fact, the fate of the intellectual and his privileged role in society. McDougall's second significant contribution to the field is in directly confronting the issue of the quality of modern Chinese literature. She unmasks the phenomenon of "inferior literary texts masquerading as modern masters" (p. 24). She implies that modern Chinese literary studies needs a massive reevaluation as a field, especially given the complicity of Western sinology in the construction of imagined authors and audiences. McDougall points out "how very little still is known about Chinese writers and readers, and how unreliable or untested much of the information that we have about them is" (p. 1). Chapter 2, "Modern Chinese Literature and Its Critics," sets the scene for the latter parts of the book as McDougall systematically raises questions about the process of canonization from the May Fourth through the post-Cultural Revolution periods. She argues that canonization has not been well studied, and notes that both intended and actual audiences have been ignored. Moreover, by treating literary texts as social science documents that provide a window into the "public and private consciousness" of authors and readers, Western scholarship has been complicit in canonization by taking for granted and valorizing the "official literature." This discourse of canonization directly influences the reception of modern Chinese literature inside and outside China, and has been counterproductive to the field as a whole: "For contemporary Chinese writers, however, the lack of an enthusiastic Western response has been deeply disappointing. Since May Fourth, Chinese writers have seen themselves as contributing to world literature, and to be disregarded in this way undermines the internationalism that they strive for" (p. 37). McDougall's demystification of this century-long cycle of inbred, mutually self-invested writing and critique, moreover, demonstrates "the huge conceptual gap between Western critical methodologies and non-Western literary texts" (p. 30). She brilliantly suggests that modern Chinese literature holds the potential for advances in world literary understanding by demonstrating the necessity to "adapt Western literary theories to deal with...

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Edited by Rey Chow. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 328 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Edited by Rey Chow. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 328 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Editor's Column: Comparative Literature and Canonicity

??? COHPAnATIST EDITOR'S COLUMN: COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CANONICITY What did comparatists really think when their colleagues in the national literatures began debating, critiquing, or defending "the canon"? Their reaction was probably deeply ambivalent, unless the term was modified by adjectives like "English," "Western," or "Greek and Latin classical," to name only the literary canons most often invoked in the United States in recent decades. More than most scholars, comparatists are likely to recognize the multitude ofpossible canons and their dependence on the specific frames of reference of a given scholarly or educational context. Thus, at the onset ofthe canon debates, when Herbert Lindenberger argued for the "normality ofcanon change" in the mid-1980s, he began with a contemporary example from the United States, then turned to nineteenth -century Germany and to Hellenistic times. Or, in a review essay in this issue that presents another such example, Eugene Eoyang traces the shift in focus since the 1970s in American studies of Chinese literature , from the traditional classical canon to an emerging modern one. In a similar spirit we might consider a recent flurry ofprotest against a new EngUsh curriculum at a Washington-area university, with an eye to some ofits implications for comparative literature. Certainly the elimination ofrequired courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton points up major changes in the nature of English studies, changes which, in a mainly English-speaking country, cannot help but influence the practice of comparative literature. These changes are addressed, in a broader educational, professional, and historical setting, by Wendell Harris's essay in this issue, though opinions on these matters in other literature departments will naturally differ to some degree. At the same time, however , the controversy reminded this comparatist of another, apparently forgotten canonical threesome—a "Western" one that placed Shakespeare in the wider linguistic and cultural contexts of Homer and Dante. Whatever the protestors' animus against the most recent triad of race, gender, and class, the seemingly easy effacement of Homer and Dante in favor ofMilton and Chaucer could provoke reflection in its own right. For one thing, this English-only canon points up the declining centrality of Dante for contemporary literary study in the United States, a trend that is examined from another angle in an essay by this issue's guest editor, Mary Ann Frese Witt. In a companion piece, Jeanne Smoot argues for Homer's continued relevance in our age ofmulticulturalism. More broadly , however, the protesters' apparent unconcern for cultural and linguistic diversity (even to the limited extent provided by Western literature in translation) revealed comparative literature's perennial lack ofcanonical status within the American university, whether that university is seen historically, in its imported late-nineteenth-century form, or in its current high-tech avatar. For many reasons, then, comparatists will probably feel that discussions ofthe canon can be limited and misleading. Vol·. 21- (2000): 1 EDITOR'S COLUMN "Canonicity" would seem preferable, with its connotations both of allowing for different canons in different cultural situations and of trying to gain theoretical distance and perspective on an often contentious topic. This year's issue of 77ie Comparatist begins with a unit that explores these questions in greater depth. Inspired by an SCLA-sponsored seminar at the 1998 meeting ofthe American Comparative Literature Association , it assumed its current shape under the direction of Associate Editor Witt. To the essays by Jeanne Smoot and herself, both based on presentations at the original seminar, she has added newly commissioned ones by Harris and by Sarah Lawall (now the general editor ofthe Norton Anthology of World Literature), as well as a thoughtful introduction . Taken as a whole, the unit brings home the often overlapping but at times competing visions ofcanonicity evoked by such much-used terms as "great books," "universality," "world literature," "multiculturalism," or "globalization." At a more practical level, the essays examine the impact of anthologies and curricular choices on canon formation, and seek —at a time of some tension between literary and cultural study—to single out and defend the merits of the literary. The essays by Lawall and Witt also consider what an ideal comparatist curriculum might look like at the current juncture in the United States. The next three...

When Whiteness Feminizes...: Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Ethics after Idealism:Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana University Press, 1998). She is also editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Duke University Press,forthcoming).

Seminal Dispersal, Fecal Retention, and Related Narrative Matters: Eileen Chang's Tale of Roses in the Problematic of Modern Writing

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Ethics after Idealism:Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana University Press, 1998). She is also editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Duke University Press,forthcoming).

Writing in the Realm of the Senses. Introduction

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Ethics after Idealism: Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana University Press, 1998). She is also editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Duke University Press,forthcoming).

Writing Women in Late Imperial China (review)

Reviews 577 New Individual Income Tax Law: Implications for Foreign Business," EastAsian Executive Reports (November 1993): p. 7. 5.It is still ofinterest to note that, from the perspective ofthe foreign investor in the PRC, the last major part ofthe drive toward tax unification and harmonization focuses on ensuring that the business profits ofboth foreign-owned and domestic entities are taxed equally. Paradoxically , foreign-owned enterprises are currently granted numerous tax exemptions and other incentives that are simply not available to other taxpayers. Although government officials have indicated on numerous occasions that, sooner rather than later there will be "a level playing field," the perceived need to attract foreign investment to the PRC has ensured that this has not yet happened. Again, seemingly paradoxically, many foreign-owned enterprises would welcome a truly "level playing field" in both its taxation (consider, e.g., the current VAT controversies such as VAT refunds on exports) and general commercial (e.g., access to the PRC domestic market) aspects. 6.Such as those in chapter 3 relating to the application of the PRCs foreign tax-credit rules and the taxation ofcontracted projects, and those in chapters 4 to 6 on liability to Value Added Tax, Consumption Tax, and Business Tax. 7.For example, reasonable emphasis is placed throughout the book on taxation and accounting compliance obligations (see particularly, chapter 2 and p. 48); thin capitalization is dealt with as is the contentious issue of deductibility ofmanagement fees paid to an associate (see pp. 50-51). mm Ellen Widmer and Kang-I Sun Chang, editors. Writing Women in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. xiii, 544 pp. Hardcover $65.00, isbn 0-8047-2871-2. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-8047-2872-0. Writing Women in Late Imperial China is a landmark book, one that stands as a confirmation ofthe recent changes in the study of Chinese literature and culture. Its thirteen essays combine solid scholarship and useful critical methods, applying them deftly, undogmatically, and with appropriate self-awareness. What is more, they bring these to bear on important, and fascinating, material—much ofit previously neglected in English and little treated in Chinese. Every academic library should own a copy; every person interested in Chinese literature or the late imperial period should read it. ^ ___ , TT . The authors examine both women writers and representations ofwomen in© 1998 by Universityr ofHawai'iPresswriting (and a fewpaintings) from the Ming—especially after the mid-sixteenth century—and Qing, with scattered references to earlier times. In so doing, they recognize the challenging questions that must accompany their task, questions too 578 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 often glossed over in the past. Who did the writing—and who didn't? Which texts survived, and why? What are the effects upon our understandings ofthe linguistic and cultural lenses through which we view these inscriptions ofselves and ofothers? The authors find many issues affecting both interpretations and what there is to interpret. Among them are: Ming loyalism and centuries of anti-Manchu sentiments , ideological stances vis-à-vis modernity, feelings about qing ("emotions, passion"), various notions of feminine or masculine virtue and ofwhat it means to be a courtesan, ways of claiming or subverting authority, assorted feminisms, ideas about literary genres, and social and attitudinal changes over time. The book offers us not only fresh insights into a familiar text, the Hong lou meng, but new information about a vital era, one in which writing by women flourished and discussions of China's own "woman question" were taken quite seriously. Old myths of unbroken, victimized muteness on the part ofwomen in traditional China (including the variant, "oh yes, a woman could write poems— her name was Li Qingzhao") simply do not stand in the face of the kind of evidence that is provided here. In part 1, five essays (by Paul S. Ropp, Wai-yee Li, Dorothy Ko, Katherine Carlitz, and Yasushi Old) discuss courtesans both as writers and as the writtenabout . They investigate complex interweavings of idealization and denigration, voyeurism and sexual desire, social statuses, women's relationships widi other women (including women in literature), the construction of both male and female selves, the crossing of...

International Theory and the Transnational Critic: China in the Age of Multiculturalism

I begin with the ongoing debate in the field of comparative literature as a point of departure for reflecting on the current state of Chinese literary and cultural studies. There are several reasons for doing this. First, by definition, comparative literature crosses many boundaries-linguistic, national, and cultural, to name only the most obvious ones-therefore, the transnational and transcultural thrust of comparative literature makes it a logical site for discussions on multiculturalism. Second, as a modern Western discipline, comparative literature has exerted a significant influence on Chinese literary studies for decades. Quite a few scholars in the latter field in North America and Europe are trained in comparative literature and play a major role in the introduction of contemporary theory and practice, including multiculturalism, to Chinese audiences. Finally, comparative literature distinguishes itself from other kinds of literary studies by its comparative

Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem

For several years now, with much fanfare and controversy, what is generally known as theory-by which is really meant poststructuralist theory, even though other types of discourses are sometimes includedhas made its way into modern Chinese literary (and, of late, cultural) studies. Numerous publications, issued by university presses such as Stanford, Duke, California, and others, seem to respond to the consensus, among the younger generations of scholars at least, that some use of or reference to theory is a necessity.1 While the most prominent example is probably

Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction

Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China. In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the miser and the shrew-caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior woman? The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender and sexuality.

The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism of Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West (review)

278 China Review International: Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1994 Jing Wang. The Story ofStone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism o/Dream ofthe Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West. Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke University Press, 1992. x, 347 pp. Hardcover $37.50. Paperback $18.95. In the past decade, significant attempts have been made to relate recent developments in literary theory to studies of Chinese literature—the work of Pauline Yu comes readily to mind in this regard.1 Wang Jing's The Story ofStone is an erudite contribution to this area of work which deals in detail and at a general level with the poststructuralist concept of "intertextuality" and, specifically, with how this concept might illuminate our reading of stone imagery in three famous Chinese novels. Professor Wang brings to this task an impressive and extensive knowledge of works byWestern theorists such as Kristeva, Foucault, Barthes, Genette, Jameson, Greimas, and Derrida as well as Aie full range of the relevant Sinological studies. The result is a valuable book that will be stimulating and rewarding for most students of classical Chinese literature and poetics. Starting with Julia Kristeva's insight that "no text is ever completely free of other texts," Wang argues that intertextuality "is a universal phenomenon that defines the communicative relationships between one text and another, and, particularly , in the case of age-old writing traditions, between a text and its context" (p. 2). Drawing on A. J. Greimas' theory of structural semantics, Wang constructs a mythological dictionary of stone lore and derives from it "certain vantage points for interpreting the stone imagery that emerges" in the Airee Chinese novels (p. 23). The chapter titled "The Mythological Dictionary of Stone," which examines sources of stone myths and stone lore in Chinese culture, is a welcome contribution to studies of Chinese mythology and folklore. Students of the history of Chinese gardens will also find it a very useful work that can be read with profit in conjunction with lohn Hay's Kernels ofEnergy, Bones ofEarth: The Rock in Chinese Art.2 By drawing on her mythological dictionary, Wang was able to articulate a series of nuanced and complex readings of aspects of the three Chinese novels in the remaining chapters of her work. Overall, students of Chinese novels will find much to ponder and admire in Wang's study, both in its detailed remarks and in its careful articulation of the methodological considerations involved in relating contemporary theory to classical Chinese materials. Poststructuralists will appreciate Wang's understanding of© 1004 bv University ^e Ulmts 0^dogmatic structuralism in trying to construct her mythological dicofHawai 'i Presstionary as an open-ended entity rather than as a complete and systematic interpretative model with "an absolute generative power" (p. 23). Reviews 279 It is the broader theoretical project announced in the opening chapter of Wang's work, "Intertextuality and Interpretation," that will perhaps be most provocative and controversial for its specialist readers. Here, Wang attempts to displace the older concept of"allusion" with that of"intertextuality" in fhe study of Chinese literature generally and explores specific ramifications witii regard to the study of stone imagery in the three Chinese novels. The study of"allusion" is tied to authorial intentions in traditional criticism, and she points out that "intertextuality" is a broader conception based on the notion that "two texts may converge without there arising the question of influence or authorial intention" (p. 6). Professor Wang is fully aware that her work is located in a contested field and at times advances her claims in a strident manner. A brief (thirry-three-page) and challenging theoretical text that opens up a lengtiiy substantive study perhaps inevitably raises more questions than it can be reasonably be expected to answer, and one gets the impression that Professor Wang must have much more to say about her theoretical agenda. Wang distinguishes "allusion" from "recontextualization" in that "the practitioners of the former cite the reference to the past in order to internalize literary models (and, more often than not, to lend prestige and authority to their own texts), rather than bringing to our consciousness the specific historicity...

From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China (review)

Reviews 287 Ellen Widmer and David Der-WeiWang, editors. From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993, xviii, 435 pp. Hardcover $49-95, paperback $24.95. copyright1994 by University of Hawai'i Press This is the third in an unplanned sequence ofconference volumes that serve as markers ofthe state of studies of Chinese literature outside China over the past quarter century. The first volume, Modern Chinese Literature in the MayFourth Era (edited by Merle Goldman), was based on a 1974 conference and published in 1977. Its three parts explored native and foreign influences on May Fourth writing , examined the social roles and literary styles of several important writers, and assessed continuities and change since the 1920s. Writing at a time when China was "closed" to most outside scholars, the authors in the Goldman volume had little reason to believe that the May Fourth canon would ever be surpassed in this century. Bonnie S. McDougalPs edited volume Popular Chinese Literature and PerformingArts in the People's Republic ofChina, 1949-1979 (published in 1984 and including ajuvenile piece of my own) drew on a 1979 conference and a conviction among its authors that post-May Fourth literature deserved attention in its full range. There was probably also a suspicion among the conference participants that the full flower of Maoist artistic effort should be plucked before it withered in the new era. Many of the authors had spent time in China being exposed to their subjects first-hand. The present volume can be regarded as the third in this unplanned series. Its efforts to identify linkages between the May Fourth era and post-Maoist fiction, the enthusiasm of its authors for their subjects, and the authors' broader understanding ofthe social and cultural contexts of their texts, make this collection a valuable successor to the pioneering of the first two volumes. The latest book's relative sophistication also suggests that the study of Chinese literature is breaking out of the realm of the exotic to which other scholars ofliterature have tended to confine it, perhaps not without encouragement from workers in this field themselves. The volume is introduced in turn by the two editors. In her preface, Ellen Widmer incisively outlines some of the disjunctions that encourage caution in seeking continuities between the May Fourth era and the 1980s. She also makes 288 China Review International: Vol. ?, No. ?, Spring 1994 explicit comparisons with the Goldman volume, pointing out the methodological advances made since 1974, the more recent recognition of the importance of gender, and the current volume's interest in a literature that is still evolving. David Der-Wei Wang exemplifies the methodological ambition ofmuch ofwhat follows in an introduction to the three broad parts of the volume, although a probably unintended air of self-congratulation intrudes: "At last, criticism arrives to restore China to itselfby translating fiction and film into its own higher language ." (page 1). The three parts in which the twelve chapters are grouped are titled "Country and City," "Subjectivity and Gender," and "Narrative Voice and Cinematic Vision ." As in all conference volumes, the grouping can appear awkward, particularly in the third part (more later). In Part One, Joseph S. M. Lau analyzes Han Shaogang's post-1985 fiction, tracing Han's transition from a Maoist "ventriloquist of received opinions to the soliloquist ofprivate anxieties" (p. 23). Lau brings out well the invented and grotesque features of Han's contributions to the 1980s "search for roots" (xungen). Michael S. Duke's discussion of Mo Yan's stories emphasizes what he calls Mo's pessimism at the expense of acknowledging the appeal ofhis more boisterous qualities to many Chinese readers. Indeed, throughout the volume there is little reference to the audiences of the fiction and few films discussed. Duke's analysis takes a mathematical bent, makes the far from startling observation that Chinese peasants do not talk very much, and includes a rather forced comparison with Lu Xun's imagery. More nuanced is Jeffrey C. Kinkley's chapter on Shen Congwen's contemporary legacy, in which he tries not to exaggerate the continuities and influences from Shen's work on writers...

Out of the Cultural Ghetto. Theory, Politics, and the Study of Chinese Literature

Out of the Cultural Ghetto. Theory, Politics, and the Study of Chinese Literature

Re-envisioning the Institution of Modern Chinese Literature Studies: Strategies of Positionality and Self-Reflexivity

Other| August 01 1993 Re-envisioning the Institution of Modern Chinese Literature Studies: Strategies of Positionality and Self-Reflexivity Yingjin Zhang Yingjin Zhang Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (1993) 1 (3): 816–832. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1-3-816 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Yingjin Zhang; Re-envisioning the Institution of Modern Chinese Literature Studies: Strategies of Positionality and Self-Reflexivity. positions 1 August 1993; 1 (3): 816–832. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1-3-816 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1993 by Duke University Press1993 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Commentary You do not currently have access to this content.

Thoughts on Politics and Critical Paradigms in Modern Chinese Literature Studies

Professor Liu Kang's Politics, Critical Paradigms: Reflections on Modern Chinese Literature Studies (1993 [this issue]; all quoted text refers to Liu unless otherwise specified) is a stimulating discussion that raises many important questions concerning the state of the field today. Liu's laudable goal is to bring the field of modern Chinese literature studies into the global debate on postmodern culture and literature. On this account, perhaps, his narrative seems to have certain affinities with postmodernist metafiction in its refusal to state a coherent theme, its inscribing and then undermining of certain values so the reader never knows exactly what the author thinks (author being a dead category anyway, killed by Barthe in imitation of Nietzsche killing God), and its eschewal of closure. After making a number of assertions about the adequacy or inadequacy of various approaches to the study of modem Chinese literature in the United States, Liu goes on to what appears to be a generally positive assessment of one Chinese literary theorist and a number of largely unnamed avant-garde literary critics, and ends in a series of unanswered questions. Like all serious students and scholars, Liu has engaged a great deal of intellectual and moral passion in the article. He has also tried to be fair in handing out praise and blame to various well-known scholars in the field. They are either praised or blamed (sometimes both) for

Chinese Literary Studies and Post-Structuralist Positions: What Next?

By the early 1970s, the spectre of post-structuralism had begun to haunt the corridors of certain departments of English and Philosophy in a number of French, American and English tertiary institutions. The term 'deconstruction' was variously seen as provocative and essential or, conversely, as politically-charged, unintelligible and unnecessary by the many academics and critics who either flocked to embrace it or dismissed it out of hand. There were not too many people who were able to maintain neutrality in relation to the 'newspeak' of post-structuralist discourse, and the term 'deconstruction', with which this discourse was most frequently associated, came to signify a crisis of grand proportions in literary studies for its opponents and proponents alike. Deconstruction revealed through the many textual strategies adopted in its name that the discipline of literary studies was governed less by authoritative and reliable rules of analysis and interpretation than by an unhappy pluralism which masked its uncertainties through the privileging of literature, like philosophy, as language in its most authentic form. By the 1980s, battles fought in the name of poststructuralism/deconstruction had largely been won, thanks in part to the support lent by many postgraduate students in various disciplines of the Humanities who committed themselves to the task of mastering the 'newspeak' and its problematic concepts and who embarked on their