Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922225
L. Klein
Examining how contemporary poets raised in China are looking at classical Chinese poetry from the Tang—in particular, the poetry and the figure of Li Bai 李白 (701–762)—this article questions the epistemological divide, common to scholarship, between premodern and modern Chinese poetry. The texts come from Shenqing shi 深情史 (Histories of Affection) by Liu Liduo 劉麗朵 (1979–); The Banished Immortal, Chinese-American poet and novelist Ha Jin's 哈金 (1956–) biography of Li Bai; the book-length poem-sequence Tang 唐, by Yi Sha 伊沙 (1966–); and poet Xi Chuan's 西川 (1963–) scholarly book Tang shi de dufa 唐詩的讀法 (Reading Tang Poetry). The author contends not only that these writers' dealings with Tang poetry make it part of a still-living tradition but also that such engagement offers a way to understand the dynamic, rather than static, canonicity of Tang poetry.
{"title":"What Does Tang Poetry Mean to Contemporary Chinese Writers?","authors":"L. Klein","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922225","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Examining how contemporary poets raised in China are looking at classical Chinese poetry from the Tang—in particular, the poetry and the figure of Li Bai 李白 (701–762)—this article questions the epistemological divide, common to scholarship, between premodern and modern Chinese poetry. The texts come from Shenqing shi 深情史 (Histories of Affection) by Liu Liduo 劉麗朵 (1979–); The Banished Immortal, Chinese-American poet and novelist Ha Jin's 哈金 (1956–) biography of Li Bai; the book-length poem-sequence Tang 唐, by Yi Sha 伊沙 (1966–); and poet Xi Chuan's 西川 (1963–) scholarly book Tang shi de dufa 唐詩的讀法 (Reading Tang Poetry). The author contends not only that these writers' dealings with Tang poetry make it part of a still-living tradition but also that such engagement offers a way to understand the dynamic, rather than static, canonicity of Tang poetry.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"71 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83840070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690396
C. Rojas
Taking as its starting point Michel Foucault's use of the biological species metaphor in his claim that, in nineteenth-century Europe, “the homosexual was now a new species,” this article considers the sudden explosion of homoerotic activities and cultural representations in Greater China beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The article focuses in particular on four literary works dating from around 1994 that examine queer individuals in relation modern institutional structures associated with disciplines of biology/science, reportage/media, medicine/activism, and policing/psychiatry. At the same time, however, through attention to the role played by these institutional structures in shaping new queer subjectivities, each of these four works emphasizes the subject's ability to intervene in the discursive formations within which those same subjectivities are positioned and thereby to narrativize the subject's own identity.
{"title":"“A New Species”","authors":"C. Rojas","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690396","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Taking as its starting point Michel Foucault's use of the biological species metaphor in his claim that, in nineteenth-century Europe, “the homosexual was now a new species,” this article considers the sudden explosion of homoerotic activities and cultural representations in Greater China beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The article focuses in particular on four literary works dating from around 1994 that examine queer individuals in relation modern institutional structures associated with disciplines of biology/science, reportage/media, medicine/activism, and policing/psychiatry. At the same time, however, through attention to the role played by these institutional structures in shaping new queer subjectivities, each of these four works emphasizes the subject's ability to intervene in the discursive formations within which those same subjectivities are positioned and thereby to narrativize the subject's own identity.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"2 1","pages":"277-297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82832176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690420
Martin Svensson Ekström
The author argues that the Greek tradition of ekphrasis and the Chinese genre of fu 賦 share at least two essential characteristics: they are devoted to exhaustive descriptions and are manifestly nonmetaphorical. The six texts under scrutiny—Mei Sheng's fu poem “Qi fa,” book 6 of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, Zuo Si's preface to his “Sandu fu,” Xunzi's analysis of Zhou tombs and funerary rituals in his “Li lun” essay, the “Shield of Achilles” episode in the Iliad, and the metaphorical section of Sima Xiangru's “Shanglin fu”—all employ a similar set of rhetorical strategies but with different emphases. A reading of one in light of the others reveals new information about Chinese and Western theories of representation and metaphoricity. For example, Homer makes his audience alternate between belief and disbelief in the scenes engraved on Achilles's shield. A similar to-and-fro movement in Xunzi's ekphrastic text is configured very differently. By contrast, the abrupt change in mode of expression from ekphrasis to metaphor at the end of “Shanglin fu” emphasizes the key themes of that poem: the shift from excess to frugality, from hedonistic pleasure seeking to ritualized asceticism, and from aristocratic (and thus vulgar) display of wealth to a royal celebration of purity and introspection.
{"title":"Metapoetic Readings around Ekphrasis and Fu 賦","authors":"Martin Svensson Ekström","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690420","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The author argues that the Greek tradition of ekphrasis and the Chinese genre of fu 賦 share at least two essential characteristics: they are devoted to exhaustive descriptions and are manifestly nonmetaphorical. The six texts under scrutiny—Mei Sheng's fu poem “Qi fa,” book 6 of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, Zuo Si's preface to his “Sandu fu,” Xunzi's analysis of Zhou tombs and funerary rituals in his “Li lun” essay, the “Shield of Achilles” episode in the Iliad, and the metaphorical section of Sima Xiangru's “Shanglin fu”—all employ a similar set of rhetorical strategies but with different emphases. A reading of one in light of the others reveals new information about Chinese and Western theories of representation and metaphoricity. For example, Homer makes his audience alternate between belief and disbelief in the scenes engraved on Achilles's shield. A similar to-and-fro movement in Xunzi's ekphrastic text is configured very differently. By contrast, the abrupt change in mode of expression from ekphrasis to metaphor at the end of “Shanglin fu” emphasizes the key themes of that poem: the shift from excess to frugality, from hedonistic pleasure seeking to ritualized asceticism, and from aristocratic (and thus vulgar) display of wealth to a royal celebration of purity and introspection.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"83 9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91136039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690444
Haiyan Lee
This article revisits a controversy that initially unfolded three decades ago. The immediate impetus for revisiting the controversy is the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 protests that ended in a massacre in Tiananmen Square. An intermediate reason is to reflect on how the methodological questions at the heart of that controversy are still very much alive as the protean field of Chinese studies continues reinventing itself in relation to theory. A still deeper reason is to rethink, via Bruno Latour, the status of fiction in the age of posttruth and fake news—a task incumbent upon all of us who call ourselves literary scholars.
{"title":"Latour, Tiananmen, and Glass Slippers; or, What We Talk about When We Talk about Chinese Studies","authors":"Haiyan Lee","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690444","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article revisits a controversy that initially unfolded three decades ago. The immediate impetus for revisiting the controversy is the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 protests that ended in a massacre in Tiananmen Square. An intermediate reason is to reflect on how the methodological questions at the heart of that controversy are still very much alive as the protean field of Chinese studies continues reinventing itself in relation to theory. A still deeper reason is to rethink, via Bruno Latour, the status of fiction in the age of posttruth and fake news—a task incumbent upon all of us who call ourselves literary scholars.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"39 1","pages":"457-474"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87506012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690436
Xiaolu Ma
Since Edward Said published his seminal study on Orientalism, the notion of the Orient has been heavily discussed and hotly debated in both the Eastern and Western worlds. While early studies of Orientalism mainly underline Western fantasies of an exotic East as the West's “other,” Chinese scholars have also been inspired to reconceptualize the notion of the Orient in recent decades. By examining the formation of the notion of dongfang 東方 (the Orient) through journal publications, academic disciplinary construction, and the writing of oriental history, this article observes how the Chinese world of letters identified China with the Orient when China attempted to accommodate itself to a Eurocentric historical narrative in the 1920s. The article further investigates how the Chinese achieved a strategic alliance with Soviet Russia in the 1950s to confront the Western cultural centers of Europe and the United States and how Chinese academia repositioned itself in response to the adoption of Western criticism on Orientalism in the 1980s. This article also traces the institutionalization of oriental literature studies in modern China under the influence of both Soviet Russian and Western European academia to investigate how reimagining the Orient has enabled Chinese scholars to reorient Chinese literature within the genealogy of world literature. This article thus aims to shed light on the Chinese reconfiguration of Chinese cultural identity in an ongoing negotiation between East and West.
{"title":"“The Orient” versus Dongfang","authors":"Xiaolu Ma","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690436","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Since Edward Said published his seminal study on Orientalism, the notion of the Orient has been heavily discussed and hotly debated in both the Eastern and Western worlds. While early studies of Orientalism mainly underline Western fantasies of an exotic East as the West's “other,” Chinese scholars have also been inspired to reconceptualize the notion of the Orient in recent decades. By examining the formation of the notion of dongfang 東方 (the Orient) through journal publications, academic disciplinary construction, and the writing of oriental history, this article observes how the Chinese world of letters identified China with the Orient when China attempted to accommodate itself to a Eurocentric historical narrative in the 1920s. The article further investigates how the Chinese achieved a strategic alliance with Soviet Russia in the 1950s to confront the Western cultural centers of Europe and the United States and how Chinese academia repositioned itself in response to the adoption of Western criticism on Orientalism in the 1980s. This article also traces the institutionalization of oriental literature studies in modern China under the influence of both Soviet Russian and Western European academia to investigate how reimagining the Orient has enabled Chinese scholars to reorient Chinese literature within the genealogy of world literature. This article thus aims to shed light on the Chinese reconfiguration of Chinese cultural identity in an ongoing negotiation between East and West.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"8 1","pages":"430-456"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80540211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690404
Keru Cai
This article examines Ding Ling's 丁玲 (1904–86) practice of intertextuality in her famous 1927 story “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日記 (Miss Sophia's Diary) by means of the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism. Sophia's diary is in dialogue with a plethora of texts she has read or encountered before. Ding Ling uses these intertexts to shed light on Sophia's negotiations with the New Woman's identity, as well as with the medium of the written word. At the same time, Sophia's diary is perennially in dialogue with anticipated readers or interlocutors. The story's thematization of reading is inseparable from the motifs of looking and gazing: just as Sophia is constantly preoccupied with how people look at her, she is anxious about how her diary will be read. Thus, her diary has an inherently dialogical stance as Sophia flirts with different intertextual ways of defining herself, always implicitly in contention with others who might view or read her otherwise. The article ends by reflecting on the resonances between Sophia's textual flirtations and the story's depictions of erotic desire, suggesting that the idea of promiscuity emerges as a figure for the practice of intertextuality during the May Fourth period.
{"title":"Looking, Reading, and Intertextuality in Ding Ling's “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日記 (Miss Sophia's Diary)","authors":"Keru Cai","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690404","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines Ding Ling's 丁玲 (1904–86) practice of intertextuality in her famous 1927 story “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日記 (Miss Sophia's Diary) by means of the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism. Sophia's diary is in dialogue with a plethora of texts she has read or encountered before. Ding Ling uses these intertexts to shed light on Sophia's negotiations with the New Woman's identity, as well as with the medium of the written word. At the same time, Sophia's diary is perennially in dialogue with anticipated readers or interlocutors. The story's thematization of reading is inseparable from the motifs of looking and gazing: just as Sophia is constantly preoccupied with how people look at her, she is anxious about how her diary will be read. Thus, her diary has an inherently dialogical stance as Sophia flirts with different intertextual ways of defining herself, always implicitly in contention with others who might view or read her otherwise. The article ends by reflecting on the resonances between Sophia's textual flirtations and the story's depictions of erotic desire, suggesting that the idea of promiscuity emerges as a figure for the practice of intertextuality during the May Fourth period.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"34 1","pages":"298-325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74461448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690428
Zongqi Cai
The term qing 情 (emotion) has lain at the core of Chinese thinking about literature from antiquity through modern times. It is of profound paradigmatic significance because each major reconceptualization of qing by literary writers and scholars almost invariably signifies and undergirds a new direction of literary production and reception. Mapping out qing's long and complex lexical-conceptual history over the millennia is crucial to the study of Chinese literary thought, premodern and modern alike. In undertaking such a historicized macro study, this article consistently grounds it in the microanalysis of influential and representative statements on qing made since antiquity. Through careful contextualization, it seeks to determine which particular meaning(s) of qing is most likely intended in each instance and if and how an author has reconceptualized the term to present a new understanding of literature. It also strives to assess the theoretical significance of all major qing reconceptualizations in the broader context of Chinese intellectual and literary history. Wherever appropriate, it draws insights from Western emotion studies to illuminate hitherto unrecognized theoretical significance of some major qing reconceptualizations.
{"title":"A Study of Early Chinese Concepts of Qing 情 and a Dialogue with Western Emotion Studies","authors":"Zongqi Cai","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690428","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The term qing 情 (emotion) has lain at the core of Chinese thinking about literature from antiquity through modern times. It is of profound paradigmatic significance because each major reconceptualization of qing by literary writers and scholars almost invariably signifies and undergirds a new direction of literary production and reception. Mapping out qing's long and complex lexical-conceptual history over the millennia is crucial to the study of Chinese literary thought, premodern and modern alike. In undertaking such a historicized macro study, this article consistently grounds it in the microanalysis of influential and representative statements on qing made since antiquity. Through careful contextualization, it seeks to determine which particular meaning(s) of qing is most likely intended in each instance and if and how an author has reconceptualized the term to present a new understanding of literature. It also strives to assess the theoretical significance of all major qing reconceptualizations in the broader context of Chinese intellectual and literary history. Wherever appropriate, it draws insights from Western emotion studies to illuminate hitherto unrecognized theoretical significance of some major qing reconceptualizations.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"146 1","pages":"399-429"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83802447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690412
K. K. Ng
This article examines the promises and predicaments of May Fourth writers in their experimental writing of the “long novel” (changpian xiaoshuo 長篇小說) as a Chinese brand of the modern epic. May Fourth intellectuals showed a conscious effort to institute a new brand of fictional genre to enlighten the reading public. Yet their “education of the novel” was far from complete, as New Literature writers found fictional expressions primarily in the form of the short story, with strong undertones of individualism, subjective lyricism, and elitism. By focusing on Mao Dun's 茅盾 (1896–1981) Ziye 子夜 (Midnight; 1933), the article examines his call for the establishment of the long novel and his strenuous efforts to “take over” the modern novel as an ideological form to narrate a teleological progression of history. How do Mao Dun's fictional narratives illuminate the representational problems between fiction, locality, and modernity? For Mao Dun and his May Fourth contemporaries, modernity at large was expressed in a teleological mode of time and progress, both in the rhetoric of modernity and in fiction writing. The article reflects on Mao Dun's creative and ideological impasse by teasing out the narrative loopholes of traditional voices and popular fictional registers in the modern epic.
{"title":"Theory and Practice of the Long Novel","authors":"K. K. Ng","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690412","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the promises and predicaments of May Fourth writers in their experimental writing of the “long novel” (changpian xiaoshuo 長篇小說) as a Chinese brand of the modern epic. May Fourth intellectuals showed a conscious effort to institute a new brand of fictional genre to enlighten the reading public. Yet their “education of the novel” was far from complete, as New Literature writers found fictional expressions primarily in the form of the short story, with strong undertones of individualism, subjective lyricism, and elitism. By focusing on Mao Dun's 茅盾 (1896–1981) Ziye 子夜 (Midnight; 1933), the article examines his call for the establishment of the long novel and his strenuous efforts to “take over” the modern novel as an ideological form to narrate a teleological progression of history. How do Mao Dun's fictional narratives illuminate the representational problems between fiction, locality, and modernity? For Mao Dun and his May Fourth contemporaries, modernity at large was expressed in a teleological mode of time and progress, both in the rhetoric of modernity and in fiction writing. The article reflects on Mao Dun's creative and ideological impasse by teasing out the narrative loopholes of traditional voices and popular fictional registers in the modern epic.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"24 1","pages":"326-352"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90802186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690380
Winnie L. M. Yee
The often-heated debates concerning Hong Kong's literary representations all take as a premise that Hong Kong has an urban identity, defined by its mythic transformation from a fishing village to a metropolis. On the return of the sovereignty to mainland China in 1997, the discourse stresses Hong Kong's exceptional status, reflecting a general anxiety that Hong Kong could be replaced by or even become just another Chinese city. This anxiety for the future is evident in an ecocritical turn, manifested in both the social realm (popular movements and organic communities) and artistic circles (independent cinema and literature). This article looks at Hong Kong literature—Wu Xubin's 吳煦斌 (1949–) stories, Dung Kai-cheung's 董啟章 (1967–) literary experiments, and a recent edited volume about plants—to determine how ecotopian imaginaries and cultural identities are closely linked to different moments in Hong Kong history. The author finds that the ecocritical turn in Hong Kong literature has opened a new space for Hong Kong's postcolonial identity.
{"title":"Reinventing “Nature”","authors":"Winnie L. M. Yee","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690380","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The often-heated debates concerning Hong Kong's literary representations all take as a premise that Hong Kong has an urban identity, defined by its mythic transformation from a fishing village to a metropolis. On the return of the sovereignty to mainland China in 1997, the discourse stresses Hong Kong's exceptional status, reflecting a general anxiety that Hong Kong could be replaced by or even become just another Chinese city. This anxiety for the future is evident in an ecocritical turn, manifested in both the social realm (popular movements and organic communities) and artistic circles (independent cinema and literature). This article looks at Hong Kong literature—Wu Xubin's 吳煦斌 (1949–) stories, Dung Kai-cheung's 董啟章 (1967–) literary experiments, and a recent edited volume about plants—to determine how ecotopian imaginaries and cultural identities are closely linked to different moments in Hong Kong history. The author finds that the ecocritical turn in Hong Kong literature has opened a new space for Hong Kong's postcolonial identity.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86701501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8690372
Ban Wang
As a champion of May Fourth enlightenment and a critic of Chinese tradition, Lu Xun is less understood as a prescient critic of the myth of science and technological rationality. Walter Benjamin invoked the utopian reconciliation of humans and nature from premodern culture in critiques of modernity. Similarly, Lu Xun conjured up images of the ancient world where rural folks lived in reciprocity with nature, worshiped supernatural beings, and observed time-honored rituals. Lu Xun linked the myth of progress and technology to a destructive chorus of “malevolent voices” by a hypocritical gentry, a technocratic elite that sought power, status, and profit in the name of enlightenment and rationality. He proclaimed that it is urgent to “rid of ourselves of this hypocrite gentry; ‘superstition’ may remain.” Invoking Benjamin's insight and affinity with Lu Xun, this article explores the Chinese writer's recovery of the mythical and ecological images from the past in the critique of modernity. Confronted with the fetishism of progress and technology in China's early modernization, Lu Xun sought to uncover and redeem primordial images from archaic traditions.
{"title":"Old Dreams Retold","authors":"Ban Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8690372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8690372","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 As a champion of May Fourth enlightenment and a critic of Chinese tradition, Lu Xun is less understood as a prescient critic of the myth of science and technological rationality. Walter Benjamin invoked the utopian reconciliation of humans and nature from premodern culture in critiques of modernity. Similarly, Lu Xun conjured up images of the ancient world where rural folks lived in reciprocity with nature, worshiped supernatural beings, and observed time-honored rituals. Lu Xun linked the myth of progress and technology to a destructive chorus of “malevolent voices” by a hypocritical gentry, a technocratic elite that sought power, status, and profit in the name of enlightenment and rationality. He proclaimed that it is urgent to “rid of ourselves of this hypocrite gentry; ‘superstition’ may remain.” Invoking Benjamin's insight and affinity with Lu Xun, this article explores the Chinese writer's recovery of the mythical and ecological images from the past in the critique of modernity. Confronted with the fetishism of progress and technology in China's early modernization, Lu Xun sought to uncover and redeem primordial images from archaic traditions.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"158 1","pages":"225-243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80023005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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