Vision Of Literature Research Articles

The concept of fiction in Soroka’s «Crumbs»

In the article, we analyze the concept of fiction in the short story collection «Crumbs» (2019) by the Ukrainian writer Petro Soroka. In this book, the author directly speaks out about his vision of literature; in some tales, he makes digressions, comments on his writing practice and narration, and outlines his understanding of fiction. All these things create a balance between the author’s intentions and concrete texts. In a broad context, the book is a valuable source for researching short stories in modern Ukrainian literature, the nature of fiction in general, and the understanding of fictionality these days. Soroka considered «Crumbs» the pinnacle of his writing. But the book remains unnoticed. The relevance of the article is grounded on this.
 The aim of the article is to outline and identify the conception of fiction proposed in «Crumbs». For that, we solve two main tasks – analyzing the author’s reflections and tracing the realized and unrealized intentions in concrete works.
 The central thesis of Soroka is that literature should mirror life. He uses theological reasoning to explain the mirror reflection in fiction (because God creates human fates, he is the best artist, so the goal of literature is not to make-believe but to reflect what God intended). We interpret this thesis and conclude that the author eliminates the main components of fictionality – the make-believe and the filling with meaning. He finds some fictionality in the representation of characters, the depiction of the current time, and the mastery of retelling. But we state that all these fictional components have lost their status because, these days, they are the constituents of nonfictional genres or texts in nonfictional spheres. The only thing that remains when it comes to fiction is the genre. The author names his writings «short stories». So the fictionality of «Crumbs» is a consensus between author and reader about the genre of the book. It arises in a receptive context. Soroka’s short stories are like artifacts that occur because of rethinking subjects in an uncharacteristic, changed context. In this sense, they are contemporary art phenomena.
 These conclusions about «Crumbs» may become a basis for researching the other writings by Petro Soroka and the short stories of other Ukrainian writers.

Reading Deuteronomic Vision in Literature

The novelistic genre acquires its full nobility through its dynamic capacity to overcome any canonical forms, incorporating intertexts that belong to other discursive fields. It is a genre with no real borders –its heterogeneous and rhizomic identity corroborates its rebellious and conquering feature. Decrying conformism and traditional mimetic sectarianism, that genre renews its borders by appropriating innovative narrative techniques, consisting of interweaving literary, mythical, cultural, and biblical values. By imbricating those intergeneric or interdiscursive figures, Paule Marshall’s fiction illustrates itself as a crucible of extratextual and complex resources. Through their combination, a poetics of heterogeneity emerges, thus generating a semantic shift, which ranges from spiritual trend to cultural one. The “Annual Excursion,” which is thematized in Praisesong for the Widow, offers a substantial and spiritual way out for a cultural reconnection and wholeness –black characters who are involved in that journey to the homeland, construct their cultural identity, connect themselves with their ancestors’ past, and restore their tarnished image. They also promise faithfulness to the “Old Parents.” In return, the latter undertakes to provide the “Out-Islanders” with spiritual and cultural protection to them. That metaphorical, spiritual covenant, which is anchored in the book of Deuteronomy, is far from being pointless or accidental, for it embodies both spiritual and cultural stakes, which the current study aims to scrutinize through the lens of the semiotics of culture. For that purpose, two points will be considered, namely “metaphorizing black ancestors’ requirements” and “the cultural scope of the spiritual covenant.

On Purpose: Interest, Disinterest and Literature We Can Live By

Abstract The idea of ‘literature we can live by’ crystallizes the paradox of art: defined by its distance from life, it requires, at the same time, proximity to life. We turn to art because it offers a protected space of disinterested play – yet we are also profoundly interested in its ethical implications. In the words of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, the work of art – and through its Apollonian patron, literature in particular – tells us that we must change our lives. Ranging widely from antiquity to modernity while highlighting key moments in early modernity and the Enlightenment, this essay identifies a recurring tension between two visions of literature: to be able to comment insightfully on life, it must be apart from it; to be able to respond adequately to life, it must be a part of it. It is not just the metaphors we live by, in other words, but also the metonyms.

Theoretical Parallels in the Exercise of the Power of Vision and Reading

This paper reflects on the nature of reading and vision as analysed in a comparison between Caravaggio’s work entitled Narcissus and a famous narration of the myth describing Narcissus and Echo as found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In lines 428-429 of Book IV in Ovid’s poem, Narcissus yearningly approaches the image of his own love as reflected in the water’s surface and touches the water. In Caravaggio’s depiction, this gesture not only shows how vision can create illusion, but also breaks the illusion through the perception of touch that renders the object of desire unperceivable and, thus, unreachable. Since Narcissus’s face does not reflect the experience of breaking the illusion, Caravaggio offers an interpretation of Ovid’s narration which suppresses the tension between perceptions via the domination of vision. The painting appears to claim that desire may remain unbroken based on vision even if Narcissus experiences the opposite. In contrast, the linearity of the narrative in Metamorphoses relays these two moments to the reader, one after the other. Additionally, in Ovid’s version, the nature of visuality and perception appears within the story of Tiresias, the blind seer. Therefore, Ovid’s thematization of vision becomes contextually connected to the literary motifs of blindness and foreseeing. The helplessness inherent to Narcissus’s physical sense of vision and Tiresias’s ability to foresee the future despite his blindness creates an opportunity for viewers and readers alike to ponder the potential of reading and vision in literature and art.

Toward a Foucauldian Literary Criticism

AbstractThe article argues for the renewed relevance of Foucault's early essays on literature, written throughout the 1960s, given a return to anthropological reflection in so much literary theory today (especially through affect theory and “new” phenomenologies—both of which rely on older categories supplied by psychoanalysis). On one hand, Foucault reminds us of all the “warped and twisted forms of reflection” that arise from anthropological thought, with its assumptions regarding the “unthought” and the hidden structures of sense and perception. This same Foucault, on the other hand, is deeply engaged with literature; his writings on a range of authors—from Homer and Cervantes, to Friedrich Hölderlin and the Marquis de Sade, to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot—constitute nothing less than an oeuvre. And yet, despite proposals to move beyond Foucauldian critique and its orthodoxy in literary studies today, hardly anything has been thought or said about this body of work in which Foucault, as David Carroll points out, “has the most to say about literature and language.” This lacuna is all the more surprising, since Foucault's early essays offer a rich and fruitful understanding of the being of literature as more than a limpid reflection of the body. In his reading of Bataille and Blanchot in particular, Foucault offers a unique vision of literature that is neither suspicious nor negative but that, in connection with his well-known critique of finitude, culminates in a hopeful call for openness.

The cult of Adam Mickiewicz in “Soviet paradise” (Lviv 1939–1941)

An ideologization of Mickiewicz began with the arrival of “Soviet paradise” and it was intensified with the Soviet presence in the former Kresy region. Mickiewicz’s politicization primarily served to encourage mass actions: rallies, academies, commemorative exhibitions, and jubilee celebrations. They put effort into placing Mickiewicz in the pantheon of internationalist artists, revolutionaries-democrats, heroes who fight for the freedom of the people, eulogists of Polish-Russian rapprochement. His carefully selected works were used as a propaganda discourse about the “one correct” vision of literature which confirms the strength and timelessness of socialist literature. The most popular linguistic strategy used in the official press (Czerwony Sztandar) was the strategy of apparent praise.

London in the Visions of Literature

London in the Visions of Literature

Literary Responses to Religious Debates at the Northern Zhou Court

In the fifth and sixth centuries, the status of the Buddhist and Daoist teachings underwent constant change. The tension between the two religious groups over state sponsorship heightened during the Northern Zhou dynasty, especially under the reign of Emperor Wu 北周武帝 (r. 560–578). While records about these events abound in historical and religious texts, very few literary pieces have survived and thus have received little attention. This article investigates three literary texts against this background, a bell inscription by Emperor Wu, and two poems by Yu Xin 庾信 (513–581 CE). My reading of Yu Xin’s allusions to Buddhism and Daoism reveals a complex attitude of the poet, who voiced veiled criticism of the sovereign through layers of allusions, and provides a rare window onto ways in which early medieval religions expanded the vision of literature of the time and enriched its imaginative realm.

Poetry of the Chinese Diaspora: A Carnival Sense of the World

ABSTRACTThis essay examines poetry of the Chinese diaspora in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of literary carnival. At the heart of Bakhtin’s theory lies a vision of literature as comprising various forces in a process of constant shifts and movements that confront a canonical centre. Chinese diaspora poetry, long understood as a marginal literary production in North America, presents an interesting case for our examination of the epistemic preoccupations in the field of literary criticism. What we need in the study of Chinese diaspora poetry is a carnivalistic mode of thinking, or rather unthinking, which is not subject to aesthetic and ideological ‘assimilation from monologic positions.’ Starting from a marginal location, Chinese diaspora poetry has been undergoing a process in which it slowly legitimates the existence of its own styles against the limiting ideological horizons. Moreover, as the notion of carnival suggests, Chinese diaspora poetry itself is not pure or monolithic, but rather multivalent and polyglot; and for the same reason, a ‘carnival sense of the world,’ which accommodates heteroglossical and heterogeneous performances, inscribes a poetic affirmation of cultural difference that allows Chinese diaspora poets to achieve self-definition and self-validation.

Literature of immigration as a literature of Europe

Any understanding of European literature that does not include immigrant literature results in an incomplete vision of literature created in Europe. As immigrant writers have sought to find a place for themselves and their writing, the labels attached to that writing have been crucial. While such debates certainly have to do with the writers themselves and how they seek to have their writing read, they also reflect an anxiety in Europe about what counts as European literature and, not incidentally, who counts as European. To examine these issues, this article takes the example of the work of Franco-Turkish writer Sema Kılıçkaya. In contrast to the usual French fear of communautarisme, which signals for many the fragmentation of society along ethnic and religious lines, the article argues that Kılıçkaya’s writing provides another model for national and European belonging, one that depends, perhaps paradoxically, on sub-national and local belonging – in both the country of origin and the country of settlement.

Имагология и имагопоэтика

The article provides a critical analysis of imagology, revealing the link between imagological approach to the Other, on the one hand, and the traditions of the analytic philosophy, post-structuralist doctrines and the method of discourse analysis, on the other. We also consider the problem of imagology’s correlation with historical poetics and investigate the role of imagology in solving some crucial political challenges for contemporary Europe, discovering the latent ideological nature of imagology. We also call for the introduction of a new notion, “imagopoetics”. The foundational difference between imagology which studies the image of the other and comparative studies or historical poetics lies both in the aspect of image studies and its methodology. Imagology primarily concentrates on the social and ideological function of the image of the Other, its role in creating stereotypes and sociocultural and national particularity, while historical politics is interested in the structure and aesthetic operation of the image. Imagology’s method is the post-structuralist discourse analysis, while historical poetics utilizes the comparative historical method. Analytical philosophy with its characteristic linguocentrism acts as a forerunner and philosophical background for discourse analysis. Imagology and historical poetics have different visions of literature. For imagology, literature is nothing more than a source and repository of the stereotypes of the Other. Literature here is devoid of mimetic and cognitive finctions, unlike the view of historical poetics, which is focused on the “spirit of the nation”. By studying mechanisms and types of constructing sociocultural and ethnic identities, as well as the chances of recoding it by creating and spreading stereotypes, imagology has a very important poetical and cultural function for contemporary Europe – shaping the common European identity.

La historia de un fecundo error: El club Dumas de Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Arturo Pérez-Reverte's vision of literature in El club Dumas derives, in part, from two fundamental principles of chaos, namely, indeterminacy and nonlinear cause-effect relations (the absence of direct connections between causes and their effects). A reading of El club Dumas in terms of indeterminacy reveals that Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla contributes to defining Pérez-Reverte's metafiction as a literary representation of existential uncertainty. In addition, nonlinear intertextuality provides Pérez-Reverte's novel with the notions of unpredictability and the unexpected. As a consequence, El club Dumas encourages readers to regard the possibility of error as a critical source of intellectual knowledge, creative innovation, and personal growth.

Visual traces of a literary manifesto: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s LIVRE/LOUVRE

This essay seeks to elucidate Jean-Philippe Toussaint's enigmatic 2012 photographic and installation art exhibit LIVRE/LOUVRE. By considering the exhibit within the context of Toussaint's practice as a writer, the essay shows how the collection of works on display at the Louvre can be read as a literary manifesto. LIVRE/LOUVRE drew the contours of a particular vision of literature, to be sure, one that insists on literature as a nexus of a number of divergent impulses: tradition and innovation, the cerebral and the sensual, the mundane and the metaphysical, the serious and the ludic. A testament to the vitality of contemporary French literature, the exhibit underscored literature as a space of freedom and experimentation—freedom for writers to experiment with new forms and freedom for readers to experiment with interpretation.

Ginzburg, Jaime. Literatura, violência e melancolia. Campinas: Editora Autores Associados, 2013.

Literatura, violência e melancolia inquires whether literature can be effective in combating violence—defined as a material and historical human construct (8). The short, though not simple, answer is “yes.” Ginzburg’s most recent book thus proposes an activist vision of literature and, in more general terms, culture.

Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949–1966) by Krista Van Fleit Hang (review)

Reviewed by: Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949–1966) by Krista Van Fleit Hang Bonnie S. McDougall (bio) Krista Van Fleit Hang. Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949–1966). Chinese Literature and Culture in the World Series, edited by Ban Wang. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xi, 193 pp. Hardcover $85.00, isbn 978-1-137-30698-2. This short book begins with a brief account of revisions made to the first and second editions of Yang Mo’s famous novel Qingchun zhi ge [Song of youth; 1958, rev. ed. 1960] that “symbolize one path of literature from the beginning of the twentieth century into the Maoist period” (p. 1). Two pages later, she describes the revisions as a process that “mirrors the path of literature in the first half of the twentieth century” (p. 3). The discrepancy between “one path” and “the path” in these two statements introduces a note of uncertainty that may be due to the author’s mission: her wish to achieve a kind of balance she finds absent in academic scholarship on modern Chinese literature, as summarized in her concluding sentences: “Literature the People Love is part of the project of understanding China’s experience in the Maoist period outside of a Cold War lens that requires either an affirmation or negation of the communist project. Appreciating the utopian vision of authors of the early Maoist period … is one way to approach this question. Engaging with these stories reveals many ways in which the ideals they present fit neither the CCP’s rigid narrative of state-bestowed liberation, nor the Western narrative of insurmountable repression in the communist system, allowing for the discovery of a relevance in that surpasses either of these narratives” (p. 158). In characterizing the writers’ vision of literature as utopian in the 1950s and early 1960s, Van Fleit Hang demonstrates both a generous sympathy for these writers and a troubling failure to understand the constraints under which they were operating and the actual social and political history of the period. Following the introduction, chapter 2 gives an account of the first volume of the magazine Renmin wenxue (People’s literature) in 1949–1950, with background information on its contributors; summaries of its theoretical and ideological articles; discussions of controversial stories by Qin Zhaoyang, Fang Ji, and Xiao Yemu; and finally analyses of two stories by actual workers in the last issue of this volume. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Li Zhun’s short story “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan” (The story of Li Shuangshuang, 1960), the novel Linhai xueyuan (Tracks in the snowy forest, 1957), and their transformations into other genres. Chapter 5 looks at two films made in 1959 and 1961 (although no mention of film is made in the book’s title). The final chapter uses the example of building the Ming Tombs Reservoir to symbolize the different paths of Maoist culture. There is much to be praised in the author’s statement in chapter 3: “I will not assume that a tightening of the political landscape leads to a less successful story. Using a relaxed political tone of the works as the sole standard of evaluation clouds our vision, preventing us from seeing different ways various artists negotiated policy and social change … My goal in this section is not to make a [End Page 206] value judgment, coming out in favor of the artistic merits of one version over the others, but rather to understand the complex factors that went into the production of literary works during the seventeen years” (pp. 62–63). It is true that many works on modern Chinese literature published during the 1970s took a narrow view of both politics and literature in China. A better understanding of the relationship between these two disciplines only began to flourish (mainly in studies published outside China) in the last thirty years. One of the issues, for example, that Van Fleit Hang brings to her analysis of Tracks in the Snowy Forest is changing attitudes toward gender roles. What is problematic about her approach, on the other hand, is its tendency to diminish the...

From Sovereignty to Ethopoiesis: Literature, Aesthetics, and New Forms of Life

There is a dilemma: either these books are already contained within Word and they must be burned, or they are contradictory and, again, they must be burned. Michel Foucault, Language to Infinity (100) consensus of culture has to be opposed by courage of art in its barbaric truth. Michel Foucault, Courage of Truth (189) If literature can be considered sovereign, it can only be in that singular, idiosyncratic conceptualization of sovereignty whose lineage can be traced to work of Georges Bataille. Only sacred, poetic words, limited to level of impotent beauty, have retained power to manifest full Bataille says, going on to equate sovereignty with a state of radical freedom (25). If literature is sovereign, it is because it insists on its autonomy from other discourses, including interpretation. It is this vision of literature that is taken up at a certain moment in time--in a style where concepts non-meaning, transgression, play, and sovereignty can be linked together--by both Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Yet despite each one taking up and adopting this Bataillean association of literature and sovereignty, different manner in which each does so (for Foucault, in A Preface to Transgression, Language to Infinity, and The Thought of Outside; for Derrida, in From Restricted to General Economy) is telling as to divergent trajectories on which this path leads them. Whereas for Derrida this poetic, ecstatic ... this sovereign speech presents occasion for an extend philosophical meditation on Hegel and Aufhebung (261), for Foucault such figures as Hegel and Kant are immediately waylaid by history and Marquis de Sade: age of Kant and Hegel, at a time when interiorization of law of history and was imperiously demanded by Western consciousness as never before, Sade never ceases speaking of nakedness of desire as lawless law of world (Thought 150). What this should indicate to us is that for Foucault this extended meditation on literature, and sovereignty thereof, that occupies him in 1960s is tied not to literature as some transhistorical object, but to literature as a strange and singular discourse that emerges at a particular historical moment; literature is, in nomenclature of archaeology, a rarity: the word is of recent date, as is also, in our culture, isolation of a particular language whose peculiar mode of is 'literary' (Order 300; on rarity, see Archaeology 118). This mutation in discourse emerges at interstices of an epistemic shift, one which sees general grammar transmuted into philology; in domain of language, as in shift from natural history to biology and analysis of wealth to political economy, The threshold between Classicism and modernity ... had been definitively crossed when words ceased to intersect with and to provide a spontaneous grid for knowledge of things (Order 304). Literature, then, is a historically specific discourse. It breaks with Classical schema of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations along with any other form of adequation; detached from ... values, even in active ludic denial of them, literature emerges in interstices of the discourse of ideas and emergent domain of philology (300). But toward what end? If social forms are immanent to their everyday practices, what problems does practice of literature inhabit? In Order of Things, Foucault offers a poetic reflection on literature whose enigma seems to be distilled into two answers: and singularity. Literature addresses itself to itself as a writing subjectivity and all its threads converge upon finest of points--singular, instantaneous, and yet absolutely universal--upon simple act of writing ... where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in brightness of its being (300). …

Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women by Barbara Sicherman (review)

Reviewed by: Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women by Barbara Sicherman Frank Warren Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women. By Barbara Sicherman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2010. Barbara Sicherman’s Well-Read Lives is an important study of the impact of reading on young women growing up in the Gilded Age who departed from the traditional path of domesticity to lead lives as journalists, physicians, educators, and social reformers. Sicherman discusses the response of young women to Alcott’s Little Women. Whereas some modern critics interpret the novel as disciplining young women due to Jo’s marriage, the vast majority of young women read the book as opening up horizons for personal fulfillment. Differences in how individuals of different class and ethnic backgrounds read Little Women lead into a discussion of the different ways young women read literature. Lonely and ashamed of having “no school experience” (58), Florence Kelley read her father’s large library with apparently “neither joy nor enlightenment” (59). In contrast, Alice Stone Blackwell read voraciously with passion. In the succeeding chapters, Sicherman explores the reading of specific women. She studies the Hamilton family, whose two most famous members were Edith Hamilton and her sister, Alice. What interests Sicherman here is reading as a family affair and how the family immersion in literature continued to connect them in their later [End Page 194] lives and led to a “reciprocal relation . . . between fiction and life” (97). In contrast to this communal reading, M. Carey Thomas’s reading started out as a more individualistic endeavor. Burned severely as a child, Thomas developed her reading during a lengthy period of recovery. She emerged as a “Romantic Victorian” (111). After graduating from Cornell, Thomas and four friends from wealthy Baltimore families formed “Friday Night” where they shared their literary readings (they championed rebels like Shelley, Godwin, and Swinburne), their gender politics, and their friendship. There were limits to their rebelliousness, but clearly the spirit of rebellion led to self-definitions that spurred later careers. Discussing Jane Addams, Sicherman explores the role of Addams’ early readings in solving her personal crisis and finding meaning in the establishment of Hull House. Ambiguous about “high culture,” Addams was afraid it divorced itself from the real life of social injustice. Her readings of Comte, Tolstoy, and George Eliot helped her see the possibilities of a meaningful life. Among Jewish immigrants, Mary Antin’s immersion in books served as an entrance into the American life she celebrated, while for Rose Cohen, books like David Copperfield helped her understand her social condition. Ida B. Wells, the subject of the final chapter, claimed that as a youth she had “never read a Negro book” (225). Her early readings included Alcott, Dickens, Bronte, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Sicherman says, however, that Wells had “no difficulty reading herself into the texts of white authors” (225). Certainly Shakespeare, whose passages Wells recited in Memphis lyceums in the early 1880s, contributed to her impressive oratorical style in her activist career as an anti-lynching crusader. Using archives, diaries, and autobiographies, Sicherman is persuasive on the role of reading in shaping women’s lives during the Gilded Age and Progressive period. At the same time she understands that class, race, and gender intertwined with reading. She also persuasively argues that the literary culture of the late nineteenth century was a woman’s culture with opportunities for women authors and with the majority of readers being women. However, it is important to remember that the editors of the leading mass circulation magazines that women wrote for and consumed were all men, men who shared certain visions of literature and helped define the women’s literary culture and helped serve as arbiters of taste. Frank Warren Queens College, City University of New York Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association

La relación literaria de Ramón Gómez de la Serna y de Valery Larbaud. Contribución a un nuevo acercamiento según los epistolarios de algunos de los «Potassons»

Il est fort bien connu que Ramón Gómez de la Serna a atteint sa diffusion internationale grâce aux efforts de son premier critique et traducteur français. Valery Larbaud, avec un grand enthousiasme et un grand dévouement, aidé par sa vision européiste et internationale de la littérature, guidé par une perspicacité sans égale, sut alors dénicher dans les Greguerías une qualité littéraire et des aspects novateurs qu’il voulut partager avec ses amis écrivains et intellectuels, de même qu’avec un lectorat français, impulsant donc en France une campagne publicitaire et de diffusion de l’œuvre de l’écrivain madrilène. Voici une page de la littérature comparée qui a été parfois interprétée de façon partielle ou même erronée, puisque bien souvent on n’a bien voulu voir que le froid intérêt de Ramón Gómez de la Serna envers son mécène français. Du fait que la correspondance de Valery Larbaud à l’amphytrion du Pombo a été égarée et que l’on ne dispose que des lettres de l’auteur espagnol, notre article prétend contribuer à offrir de nouvelles leurs sur la relation littéraire de ces deux hommes à partir de la correspondance de certains « Potassons »…

Narrating Hokkaidō: Kunikida Doppo and a new vision of literature

Narrating Hokkaidō: Kunikida Doppo and a new vision of literature

Lu Xun and Modernism/Postmodernism

Although Lu Xun (1881–1936) produced all his literary works in a period that coincided with the heyday of Western modernism (1910–30), scholars both inside and outside China have made few attempts to study them in the international context of the modernist movement. Because of Lu Xun's concern with the fate of the Chinese nation and his professed intention to be its spiritual physician, critical opinion holds that his writings are primarily political and cultural in thematics and realistic in formal representation. The scholarly consensus that he is a master of critical realism remains unchanged. However, Lu Xun's vision of literature and his writing techniques also draw on features common to symbolism, surrealism, supernatural realism, grotesque realism, magic realism, and other experimental forms. Since these are modernist, even postmodern, features, it would be of great interest to explore Lu Xun's relationship to the modernist movement that swept the West in the early twentieth century and the extent to which his writings anticipated postmodernism. I argue that his work should be viewed as a contribution to the international modernist movement from a non-Western, Third World country. Indeed, no history of international modernism is complete if it does not incorporate the incipient modernism that Lu Xun pioneered independently of the West.