Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1917259
B. Linder
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1917253
Wenying Zhu, Yvette Zhu
“Soirée in the Spring” was first published in Zuojia in 2016. The story takes place in Berlin and Shanghai and follows the love affair of a young academic. In a society where the shadow of class stratification is as dense as the intoxicating fog on riverbanks, the young academic slowly wakes up from the illusion of love to the reality of life. As the story unfolds, she must find a way to penetrate the cloak of shadow and to break free. Yet, will she? The embedded narrative structure of the novella facilitates the juxtaposition of time and space, impression and substance, the hunter and the prey as the protagonist navigates her own inner discovery.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1916372
Y. Gong, J. Shea, D. Tse
This selection of Yam Gong’s poems demonstrates his signature style, which includes mixing colloquial language (Cantonese) and everyday life with a philosophical acuity, direct address with paradox, and various lexical registers, such as dialogue, idioms, prayers, slang, and song lyrics. Yam Gong also writes with an internationalist outlook, using allusions to world literature, international news reports, and foreign languages in his work. His poem “Méditation,” for instance, refers to Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs and recasts the story of a fourth century Alexandrian courtesan in a Hong Kong setting. These poems are from Yam Gong’s book And So Moving a Stone You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2010).
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1916369
C. Rojas
Through a comparative analysis of Yan Lianke’s The Day the Sun Died with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lu Xun’s almost precisely contemporaneous collection Call to Arms, this essay considers the ways in which Yan Lianke’s novel uses motifs of death and “dreamwalking” to reflect on more abstract processes of representation and textual mediation. In particular, this essay argues that the trope of somnambulism in The Day the Sun Died is not merely an example of Yan’s mythorealist representational approach, it simultaneously offers a useful framework through which to understand mythorealism’s underlying representational logic.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1917257
Qinghua Zhang, Yvette Zhu
In this short essay, Zhang Qinghua discourses on three aspects of Zhu Wenying’s novel Aunt Lili’s Small South (Lili yima de xixiao nanfang 莉莉姨妈的细小南方). He argues that the ineluctable qualities of the novel lie within its juxtaposition of small history and grand history through the protagonist Aunt Lili and the first-person narrator. By doing so, Zhu Wenying has given us a re-telling of the persistent cultural history of the South in the delicate setting of Suzhou.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1925512
C. Rojas
c h in se lera tu re to d ay v o l. 10 n . 1 contemporary Chinese history and reality. By telling the story of the village of Shouhuo, a place of collective seclusion that resembles the utopia depicted by Tao Yuanming in his famous “Peach Blossom Spring,” Yan Lianke poignantly questions both the Communist utopian dream of the revolutionary period and the economic utopian dream of the market-reform era. In this novel, the mixture of realism and surrealism, heaviness and lightness, paradoxically makes the real compelling, essential, and apocalyptic, moving beyond any kind of textual playfulness. Yan Lianke’s masterpiece The Four Books, which is regarded as one of his most imaginative creations, has touched upon the Great Famine that was a forbidden and sensitive topic in mainland China. Echoing the texts of Confucianism and the four Gospels of the New Testament, The Four Books has provided four different narrative voices, which interweave the tapestry of life and death, body and soul, and put Chinese intellectuals represented by the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian, and Technician in the unbearable ordeal to show the complexity of human nature. Showing a philosophical dimension that is often lacking in modern Chinese literature, this novel is extremely innovative in narrative structure and language, powerfully representing one of China’s most traumatic periods. With thrilling action, unforgettable characters, an ingenious structure, exquisite language, Yan Lianke’s Four Books takes inspiration not only from Latin America’s magic realism and Russian naturalism, and particularly Dostoyevsky’s fascination with human suffering and glory, and I am convinced that they will increasingly become recognized as landmark achievements in world literature. Virtually all of Yan Lianke’s writings directly confront, at the level of their content, the history and reality of post-1949 China, together with questions of systems, power, and the humanity’s position under the revolution. In artistic terms, he skillfully absorbs Kafka’s absurdism as well as America’s black humor, while at the level of his structure and narrative he repeatedly reinvents himself, overturning readers’ assumptions and expectations. These qualities have combined to make Yan Lianke one of contemporary China’s most distinctive and celebrated authors.
c h在se lera tu re to d ay v o l.10 n。1中国当代历史与现实。阎连科通过讲述寿火村的故事，一个类似陶渊明在其著名的《桃花源》中描绘的乌托邦的集体隐居之地，尖锐地质疑了革命时期的共产主义乌托邦梦和市场改革时代的经济乌托邦梦。在这部小说中，现实主义和超现实主义的混合，沉重和轻盈，矛盾地使真正令人信服、本质和启示，超越了任何文本的游戏性。阎连科的代表作《四书》被认为是他最富想象力的作品之一，它触及了在中国大陆被禁止和敏感的大饥荒问题。《四书》呼应了儒家和新约四福音书的文本，提供了四种不同的叙事声音，交织了生与死、身体与灵魂的织锦，将以作家、音乐家、学者、神学家和技术人员为代表的中国知识分子置于难以忍受的磨难中，展现了人性的复杂性。这部小说展现了中国现代文学中经常缺乏的哲学维度，在叙事结构和语言上都极具创新性，有力地代表了中国最痛苦的时期之一。阎连科的《四书》以其惊心动魄的动作、令人难忘的人物、巧妙的结构、优美的语言，不仅受到拉丁美洲魔幻现实主义和俄罗斯自然主义的启发，尤其是陀思妥耶夫斯基对人类苦难和荣耀的迷恋，我相信它们将越来越被公认为世界文学的里程碑式成就。实际上，阎连科的所有作品在内容层面上都直接面对1949年后中国的历史和现实，以及制度、权力和人类在革命中的地位等问题。在艺术方面，他巧妙地吸收了卡夫卡的荒诞主义和美国的黑色幽默，而在他的结构和叙事层面，他反复重塑自己，颠覆了读者的假设和期望。这些品质结合在一起，使阎连科成为当代中国最具特色和最著名的作家之一。
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1916366
Lianke Yan, Eric Abrahamsen
In Yan Lianke’s works, the village is always a microcosm of China’s history. In Yan’s acceptance speech of the 2021 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, he declares that the village of his homeland is truly all of China entire, and even greater than the world. All the possibilities of humanity exist inside that village. As a writer, he is committed to discovering the connections between the village and the rest of the human world in his literature.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1917261
Amir Khan
For whom is the future of Chinese history an issue? The easy answer is that the control of China’s narrative, about its past and possible future, belongs squarely to the Chinese people. Yet through her penetrating analysis of Chinese cinema and society, Dai Jinhua shows how this battle for control cuts across global class lines. China’s future is not merely of quaint concern to its citizens in accounting for its own civilizational import and goals; rather, as Dai ominously puts it in her introduction, the imaginative burden on China is of world-historical urgency “because China must be a China of the future, or there will be no future” (22). How can this be? This volume of seven remarkable essays, organized thematically in three parts, constitutes a solid and durable intellectual primer on the thinking of Dai Jinhua. Her work is noteworthy not simply to those working in some specialized niche of film study (say, “Asian” or “world” cinemas) but to anyone interested in the expressive possibilities of the medium and what directors on the receiving end of Hollywood influence are up against. After going through Dai’s work, one begins to reorient one’s bearings; it is not global or Chinese cinema doing something at the margins of mainstream cinematic thoroughfare; rather, the only hope for renewing mainstream filmic possibilities comes from such “global” cinemas. Hollywood and even European art-house films have become conventional hence marginal. Yet, the renewal of such possibility is hardly guaranteed. Any such promise is likely to be subsumed under a certain class decimation. What Chinese cinema must contest is not the demands for blockbuster entertainment created at the behest of its rich entrepreneurial class on the one hand nor the cheap and easy mass consumption by its proletarian working class on the other. Rather, the newly minted Chinese middle class is the greatest threat to the expressive possibility of cinema. The success of Chinese war films in the early twenty-first century (Lu Chuan’s 2009 blockbuster, City of Life and Death specifically, which details the twentieth century Nanking massacre/holocaust perpetrated against China by the Japanese), for example, are not indicative to Dai of cheap nationalist jingoism suited to the masses but of a middle class desire for a type of cosmopolitan global recognition:
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21514399.2021.1916373
Hong Zhang, Yvette Zhu
In this interview, writer Zhu Wenying spoke to Zhang Hong, the Deputy Editor in Chief of Guangzhou Literature and Art Newspaper, about her earlier writings and what her earlier work attempted to accomplish.
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