Visitors are to museums what readers are to texts. Yet little attention has been paid to the reception of literary spaces, such as the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL), a literature museum established in Tainan in 2003. Going beyond exposing the museum’s political message, this study argues that a constructed sense of belonging to a nation is but one form of identification that comes into play in the museum visit. By juxtaposing production and reception in a two-week window in 2011, this paper shows how politics are written into the museum displays, but also how politics are neglected, confirmed, debated, and rejected by visitors in their spatial readings of the displays. The analysis is based on interviews that inquire about visitors’ concrete experiences. This study examines what motivates visitors to come to the NMTL, which aspects of their visit are most memorable, and to which exhibits visitors ascribe meaning. The reception of the NMTL is then placed into the context of its “authorship” by presenting insights into curatorial practices and planning from the perspective of museum staff, including Director Li Ruiteng. The interviews show that visitors actively select objects to which they assign meaning. I argue that visitors are most likely to choose exhibits with the strongest connection to their everyday life and their personal past. These meanings and experiences can bear a relation to Taiwanese, Chinese, or other forms of collective identities and yet enable them to engage with an identity discourse that is potentially disconnected from politics.
{"title":"Beyond Party Politics? Visitors and Meaning-Making in the National Museum of Taiwan Literature","authors":"E. Graf","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Visitors are to museums what readers are to texts. Yet little attention has been paid to the reception of literary spaces, such as the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL), a literature museum established in Tainan in 2003. Going beyond exposing the museum’s political message, this study argues that a constructed sense of belonging to a nation is but one form of identification that comes into play in the museum visit. By juxtaposing production and reception in a two-week window in 2011, this paper shows how politics are written into the museum displays, but also how politics are neglected, confirmed, debated, and rejected by visitors in their spatial readings of the displays. The analysis is based on interviews that inquire about visitors’ concrete experiences. This study examines what motivates visitors to come to the NMTL, which aspects of their visit are most memorable, and to which exhibits visitors ascribe meaning. The reception of the NMTL is then placed into the context of its “authorship” by presenting insights into curatorial practices and planning from the perspective of museum staff, including Director Li Ruiteng. The interviews show that visitors actively select objects to which they assign meaning. I argue that visitors are most likely to choose exhibits with the strongest connection to their everyday life and their personal past. These meanings and experiences can bear a relation to Taiwanese, Chinese, or other forms of collective identities and yet enable them to engage with an identity discourse that is potentially disconnected from politics.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49487748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mainland Chinese writers’ interest in Taiwan surged in the first decade of the twenty-first century after PRC citizens were allowed to travel and study in Taiwan, but Zhang Yiwei is the only writer who continuously published works about Taiwan for several years. Studying in Taiwan from 2010 to 2016, Zhang’s works demonstrate how a post-1980 writer’s cultural identity was informed by the changing cross-Strait relationship from the 1980s to the 2010s. This article examines Zhang Yiwei’s three Taiwan-related works, published in 2013, 2015, and 2016 respectively, arguing that even though Zhang avoids political issues, her narratives of the natural and cultural aspects of Taiwan contest both the PRC’s One-China principle and the young Chinese generation’s “Taiwanese dream.” This article contends that by defining herself as an outsider in Taiwan, her three works present a cross-Strait student migrant’s modification of cultural identity and reterritorialization of the concept of “China.”
{"title":"From the “Taiwanese Dream” to an Alien Land: The Mainland Writer Zhang Yiwei’s Literary Narratives of Taiwan","authors":"P. Huang","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Mainland Chinese writers’ interest in Taiwan surged in the first decade of the twenty-first century after PRC citizens were allowed to travel and study in Taiwan, but Zhang Yiwei is the only writer who continuously published works about Taiwan for several years. Studying in Taiwan from 2010 to 2016, Zhang’s works demonstrate how a post-1980 writer’s cultural identity was informed by the changing cross-Strait relationship from the 1980s to the 2010s. This article examines Zhang Yiwei’s three Taiwan-related works, published in 2013, 2015, and 2016 respectively, arguing that even though Zhang avoids political issues, her narratives of the natural and cultural aspects of Taiwan contest both the PRC’s One-China principle and the young Chinese generation’s “Taiwanese dream.” This article contends that by defining herself as an outsider in Taiwan, her three works present a cross-Strait student migrant’s modification of cultural identity and reterritorialization of the concept of “China.”","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42728665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates the artistic and political significance of the Le Moulin poetry society (Fengche shishe) to both Taiwan literature and world literature. Founded in 1933 in occupied Taiwan, the group consisted of Taiwanese and Japanese poets united by their aim to adopt the surrealist poetics that circulated from France via Japan. Although revisionist efforts have been made in the past two decades to integrate Le Moulin into Taiwan’s literary history, existing scholarship has largely adopted postcolonial and Sinophone frameworks. Huang Yali’s 2016 documentary, however, propounds the possibility of considering Le Moulin as world literature in Kuei-fen Chiu’s dual definition — participating in the formation of a world community of cross-cultural exchanges and opening up new literary worlds through aesthetic experimentation. This article expands Chiu’s model by contending that the Le Moulin poets’ subjugation by colonial politics and their controversial articulations of so-called “colonized mentality” were integral parts of their participation in and identification with world literature. This investigation of their political awareness and efforts to participate in the surrealist movement reveals how they unceasingly crusaded for the survival of a “world of literature” against external forces that sought to eliminate literature’s expressive potential in response to its time. Although their unilateral transculturation of French surrealism does not fit with David Damrosch’s model of translation and global circulation, Le Moulin’s contribution to the continuation and maintenance of surrealism and avant-garde poetry prompts us to reconsider and recognize the merits of works of world literature that have so far been marginalized.
{"title":"“World Literature” between Transcultural Poetics and Colonial Politics: Yang Chichang, Le Moulin, and Surrealism in Taiwan","authors":"Fang-Ping Chen","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the artistic and political significance of the Le Moulin poetry society (Fengche shishe) to both Taiwan literature and world literature. Founded in 1933 in occupied Taiwan, the group consisted of Taiwanese and Japanese poets united by their aim to adopt the surrealist poetics that circulated from France via Japan. Although revisionist efforts have been made in the past two decades to integrate Le Moulin into Taiwan’s literary history, existing scholarship has largely adopted postcolonial and Sinophone frameworks. Huang Yali’s 2016 documentary, however, propounds the possibility of considering Le Moulin as world literature in Kuei-fen Chiu’s dual definition — participating in the formation of a world community of cross-cultural exchanges and opening up new literary worlds through aesthetic experimentation. This article expands Chiu’s model by contending that the Le Moulin poets’ subjugation by colonial politics and their controversial articulations of so-called “colonized mentality” were integral parts of their participation in and identification with world literature. This investigation of their political awareness and efforts to participate in the surrealist movement reveals how they unceasingly crusaded for the survival of a “world of literature” against external forces that sought to eliminate literature’s expressive potential in response to its time. Although their unilateral transculturation of French surrealism does not fit with David Damrosch’s model of translation and global circulation, Le Moulin’s contribution to the continuation and maintenance of surrealism and avant-garde poetry prompts us to reconsider and recognize the merits of works of world literature that have so far been marginalized.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41408527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hong Kong has brought to world literature some of the most prolific and best-loved fiction writers in modern Chinese history. Dung Kai-cheung is one of them — a Hong Kong-based writer who has found the city to be a constant source of inspiration. This article discusses the significance of multiplicity in Dung’s fictional representation of Hong Kong (“the V-City”), focusing on his 2007 novel Histories of Time: The Luster of Mute Porcelain. In this novel, Dung explores the narrative possibility of perceiving Hong Kong as a multi-historical space through the lens of multiplying temporalities. I have coined the term “V-shaped time” to refer to this multiplication of characters and archaeology of ideas. Time, in Dung’s work, fans out with multiple possibilities of individual and collective experiences in history, with mirrored Vs resembling an hourglass. In this stratified narrative, characters create their fictional selves in their own writing. Identifying the creative self as a literary architect, Dung’s fictional writing challenges the reader to rethink a local history that has been marginalized in the linear narrative of colonial modernity.
{"title":"Fanning Out Possibilities: Dung Kai-cheung and the Multiplicities of Time","authors":"Meng Wu","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Hong Kong has brought to world literature some of the most prolific and best-loved fiction writers in modern Chinese history. Dung Kai-cheung is one of them — a Hong Kong-based writer who has found the city to be a constant source of inspiration. This article discusses the significance of multiplicity in Dung’s fictional representation of Hong Kong (“the V-City”), focusing on his 2007 novel Histories of Time: The Luster of Mute Porcelain. In this novel, Dung explores the narrative possibility of perceiving Hong Kong as a multi-historical space through the lens of multiplying temporalities. I have coined the term “V-shaped time” to refer to this multiplication of characters and archaeology of ideas. Time, in Dung’s work, fans out with multiple possibilities of individual and collective experiences in history, with mirrored Vs resembling an hourglass. In this stratified narrative, characters create their fictional selves in their own writing. Identifying the creative self as a literary architect, Dung’s fictional writing challenges the reader to rethink a local history that has been marginalized in the linear narrative of colonial modernity.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46480382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper investigates how the transformation of the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi, from a peripheral writer to a world literature writer, takes place. It first defines the status of Wu as a world literature writer with a discussion of the international reception of Wu’s translated works. It then studies how Wu overcomes the four obstacles for small literature writers: literary destitution, backwardness, remoteness, and invisibility. While Wu appropriates foreign patrimonies to deal with the obstacle of literary destitution, he establishes a modern profile of himself as a writer on a par with internationally acclaimed writers to counter the problem of backwardness. This study examines the complex meanings of Wu’s magical realist mode of storytelling. It argues that the global currency of this consecrated mode helps Wu address the problem of remoteness. At the same time, the magical realist mode works to reflect Wu’s planetary vision and generates the literariness that is missing in many works of environmental world literature. In addition to the literary performance of the writer, the study discusses how Wu’s agents, publishers, and the Taiwanese government join efforts to tackle the problem of invisibility.
{"title":"The Making of Small Literature as World Literature: Taiwanese Writer Wu Ming-Yi","authors":"Kuei-fen Chiu","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates how the transformation of the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi, from a peripheral writer to a world literature writer, takes place. It first defines the status of Wu as a world literature writer with a discussion of the international reception of Wu’s translated works. It then studies how Wu overcomes the four obstacles for small literature writers: literary destitution, backwardness, remoteness, and invisibility. While Wu appropriates foreign patrimonies to deal with the obstacle of literary destitution, he establishes a modern profile of himself as a writer on a par with internationally acclaimed writers to counter the problem of backwardness. This study examines the complex meanings of Wu’s magical realist mode of storytelling. It argues that the global currency of this consecrated mode helps Wu address the problem of remoteness. At the same time, the magical realist mode works to reflect Wu’s planetary vision and generates the literariness that is missing in many works of environmental world literature. In addition to the literary performance of the writer, the study discusses how Wu’s agents, publishers, and the Taiwanese government join efforts to tackle the problem of invisibility.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49659636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper investigates the contemporary cinematic representation of the White Terror period (1949–1987) in Taiwan. The government started the process of Transitional Justice in 2017, uncovering and articulating the violence of the martial law period, which has coincided with Taiwan’s search for visibility and recognition on the international stage. Meanwhile, the PRC’s military threat to annex Taiwan turns the collective memory of White Terror into a cautionary tale of dictatorship. Considering this historical and political context, I examine two commercial films set against the martial law period, Detention (2019) and Your Name Engraved Herein (2020). I argue that the two films, in their criticism of authoritarianism, construct antagonism between a paternalistic state apparatus and innocent, idealistic youth in melodramatic romantic narratives. With their hyperbolic expression of physical and psychological struggles, the pursuit of love and freedom is upheld as the ultimate expression of humanity. The romantic subjectivity formed in the melodramatic love stories eventually displaces the historical trauma, turning into escapism or gender binarism. Rather than locating and mediating the complexity of trauma, the two films celebrate liberalism by perpetuating stereotypes and exclusionism.
{"title":"To Love and Freedom: Post-martial Law Subjectivity in Detention and Your Name Engraved Herein","authors":"Chialan Sharon WANG","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the contemporary cinematic representation of the White Terror period (1949–1987) in Taiwan. The government started the process of Transitional Justice in 2017, uncovering and articulating the violence of the martial law period, which has coincided with Taiwan’s search for visibility and recognition on the international stage. Meanwhile, the PRC’s military threat to annex Taiwan turns the collective memory of White Terror into a cautionary tale of dictatorship. Considering this historical and political context, I examine two commercial films set against the martial law period, Detention (2019) and Your Name Engraved Herein (2020). I argue that the two films, in their criticism of authoritarianism, construct antagonism between a paternalistic state apparatus and innocent, idealistic youth in melodramatic romantic narratives. With their hyperbolic expression of physical and psychological struggles, the pursuit of love and freedom is upheld as the ultimate expression of humanity. The romantic subjectivity formed in the melodramatic love stories eventually displaces the historical trauma, turning into escapism or gender binarism. Rather than locating and mediating the complexity of trauma, the two films celebrate liberalism by perpetuating stereotypes and exclusionism.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48778088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines Lo Yi-chin’s 2001 novel Banishing Sorrow, a controversial tribute to the late Taiwanese queer author Qiu Miaojin. Renowned for her writings on nonnormative desires, Qiu attracted a cult following in the wake of her suicide in 1995, but her posthumous fame has paradoxically eclipsed her nuanced vision of gender and sexuality since her skepticism toward fixed categories is potentially at odds with the quest for identity and recognition in the local LGBT rights movement. Published six years after Qiu’s death, Lo’s Banishing Sorrow represents a bold effort to challenge the identity-based approach to Qiu’s work. Echoing the metaphor of the disorderly body in Qiu’s writings, Banishing Sorrow deploys the trope of corporeal fragmentation to problematize how sexual identities have become essentialized and fixed in her postmortem reception. Reading Lo’s tribute alongside Qiu’s oeuvre, this article draws on theories of mourning, spectrality, and animacy to explore how Banishing Sorrow opens up new possibilities for Qiu’s afterlife beyond the confines of identity politics.
{"title":"Queer Remains: Mourning and Inheritance in Lo Yi-chin’s Banishing Sorrow","authors":"Keyun Tian","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Lo Yi-chin’s 2001 novel Banishing Sorrow, a controversial tribute to the late Taiwanese queer author Qiu Miaojin. Renowned for her writings on nonnormative desires, Qiu attracted a cult following in the wake of her suicide in 1995, but her posthumous fame has paradoxically eclipsed her nuanced vision of gender and sexuality since her skepticism toward fixed categories is potentially at odds with the quest for identity and recognition in the local LGBT rights movement. Published six years after Qiu’s death, Lo’s Banishing Sorrow represents a bold effort to challenge the identity-based approach to Qiu’s work. Echoing the metaphor of the disorderly body in Qiu’s writings, Banishing Sorrow deploys the trope of corporeal fragmentation to problematize how sexual identities have become essentialized and fixed in her postmortem reception. Reading Lo’s tribute alongside Qiu’s oeuvre, this article draws on theories of mourning, spectrality, and animacy to explore how Banishing Sorrow opens up new possibilities for Qiu’s afterlife beyond the confines of identity politics.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47885150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“Mythorealism” is a formal literary experiment developed by Yan Lianke, whose 2008 novel Ballad, Hymn, Ode ( Feng ya song) produces a cumulative effect of absurdity that has provoked controversy over the extent to which it offers an effective social critique. In response to the scholarship based on realist readings of the novel, this article analyzes it from a “mythorealistic” perspective. It argues that the mythorealist narrative does not necessarily cancel out Yan’s social commentary but instead transfers his critical impulse to a psychological exploration of marginal intellectuals in a desymbolized society. In particular, this article is concerned with thematic interpretation and the relation between literary form and meaning in Yan’s parody of the Shijing in Ballad, Hymn, Ode. By focusing on Yan’s symbolic representation of sex and disgust, this article investigates how such imagery and motifs speak from their own space to reveal Chinese intellectuals’ spiritual crisis in an academic world pervaded with an instrumentalist ethos.
{"title":"Interpreting Mythorealism: Disenchanted Shijing and Spiritual Crisis in Yan Lianke’s Ballad, Hymn, Ode","authors":"Haiyan Xie","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"“Mythorealism” is a formal literary experiment developed by Yan Lianke, whose 2008 novel Ballad, Hymn, Ode ( Feng ya song) produces a cumulative effect of absurdity that has provoked controversy over the extent to which it offers an effective social critique. In response to the scholarship based on realist readings of the novel, this article analyzes it from a “mythorealistic” perspective. It argues that the mythorealist narrative does not necessarily cancel out Yan’s social commentary but instead transfers his critical impulse to a psychological exploration of marginal intellectuals in a desymbolized society. In particular, this article is concerned with thematic interpretation and the relation between literary form and meaning in Yan’s parody of the Shijing in Ballad, Hymn, Ode. By focusing on Yan’s symbolic representation of sex and disgust, this article investigates how such imagery and motifs speak from their own space to reveal Chinese intellectuals’ spiritual crisis in an academic world pervaded with an instrumentalist ethos.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41584365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay seeks to recover the attempts of the left-wing activists around the 1920s Sun Society ( Taiyang she) to articulate a vision of proletarian modernity based on the aesthetic potential of the machine. They did so as a result of a series of theoretical encounters with the ideas of Soviet constructivists that were largely mediated by the Japanese literary theorist Kurahara Korehito and the project of “new realism” ( xin xieshizhuyi). The essay demonstrates that “new realism” functioned as a cipher for Soviet constructivism as it moved across the proletarian literary movements of Japan and China. In response to these theoretical possibilities, Chinese writers, critics, and filmmakers sought to inscribe the aesthetic possibilities of the machine in their cultural practice, a project in which A Ying assumed a leading role. They did so with a particular investment in the sonic dimensions of machine production, consisting of the sounds of the modern factory and its proletarian subjects. Their attempts to find a cultural form adequate to machine production are explored with reference to the prose work of Yang Cunren and the canonical film New Woman ( Xin nüxing). By attending to these legacies, this essay demonstrates a series of ignored theoretical encounters across different sites of left-wing cultural production and draws our attention to the powerful appeal of a cultural language of proletarian modernity at a crucial historical moment.
{"title":"The Music of the Machine: A Ying, International Constructivism, and Sonic Modernity in Chinese Revolutionary Literature","authors":"Benjamin Kindler","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This essay seeks to recover the attempts of the left-wing activists around the 1920s Sun Society ( Taiyang she) to articulate a vision of proletarian modernity based on the aesthetic potential of the machine. They did so as a result of a series of theoretical encounters with the ideas of Soviet constructivists that were largely mediated by the Japanese literary theorist Kurahara Korehito and the project of “new realism” ( xin xieshizhuyi). The essay demonstrates that “new realism” functioned as a cipher for Soviet constructivism as it moved across the proletarian literary movements of Japan and China. In response to these theoretical possibilities, Chinese writers, critics, and filmmakers sought to inscribe the aesthetic possibilities of the machine in their cultural practice, a project in which A Ying assumed a leading role. They did so with a particular investment in the sonic dimensions of machine production, consisting of the sounds of the modern factory and its proletarian subjects. Their attempts to find a cultural form adequate to machine production are explored with reference to the prose work of Yang Cunren and the canonical film New Woman ( Xin nüxing). By attending to these legacies, this essay demonstrates a series of ignored theoretical encounters across different sites of left-wing cultural production and draws our attention to the powerful appeal of a cultural language of proletarian modernity at a crucial historical moment.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49159588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates the rehabilitation of the traditional trope of the Chinese shrew in depictions of early Chinese radical suffragettes after the establishment of the Republic of China. It argues that, rather than dying out as China entered the modern age, the shrew became central to the ways in which first-wave feminists were portrayed and perceived in public discourses. Although still typically used to insult women in early Republican China, the archetype of the shrew also functioned as a transgressive model of female empowerment that manifested modern expectations for the qualities of the new woman. Starting from analyses on how the male-dominated media deployed variations of the traditional shrew to describe the visible and confrontational nature of the radical suffragettes, this article then turns to explore how the women themselves played a part in shaping their public images. They, as social actors, exhausted every right and freedom to carve out new subjectivities for themselves to perform in society. In sometimes aligning with and other times rejecting their public labeling as shrews, the suffragettes opened a new direction for understanding the vitality of the shrew trope and for conceiving of the newly emergent public or political woman at the turn of the twentieth century.
{"title":"Wrestling with Tradition: Early Chinese Suffragettes and the Modern Remodeling of the Shrew Trope","authors":"Shu Yang","doi":"10.3366/mclc.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the rehabilitation of the traditional trope of the Chinese shrew in depictions of early Chinese radical suffragettes after the establishment of the Republic of China. It argues that, rather than dying out as China entered the modern age, the shrew became central to the ways in which first-wave feminists were portrayed and perceived in public discourses. Although still typically used to insult women in early Republican China, the archetype of the shrew also functioned as a transgressive model of female empowerment that manifested modern expectations for the qualities of the new woman. Starting from analyses on how the male-dominated media deployed variations of the traditional shrew to describe the visible and confrontational nature of the radical suffragettes, this article then turns to explore how the women themselves played a part in shaping their public images. They, as social actors, exhausted every right and freedom to carve out new subjectivities for themselves to perform in society. In sometimes aligning with and other times rejecting their public labeling as shrews, the suffragettes opened a new direction for understanding the vitality of the shrew trope and for conceiving of the newly emergent public or political woman at the turn of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":43027,"journal":{"name":"Modern Chinese Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42648088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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