Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China PDF Author: David Der-wei Wang
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1684580277
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-Wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable. Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping’s call in 2013 to “tell the good China story,” Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a “fictional turn,” which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding.

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China PDF Author: David Der-wei Wang
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1684580277
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-Wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable. Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping’s call in 2013 to “tell the good China story,” Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a “fictional turn,” which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding.

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China PDF Author: Dewei Wang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781684580286
Category : Chinese fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
"Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable. Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping's call in 2013 to "tell the good China story," Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a "fictional turn," which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding"--

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China PDF Author: David Der-wei Wang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781684580262
Category : Chinese fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-Wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable. Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping's call in 2013 to "tell the good China story," Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a "fictional turn," which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding.

The Subplot

The Subplot PDF Author: Megan Walsh
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735913667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you've never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by rotten girls, swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel-laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden-age of sci-fi. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world. Fueled by her passionate engagement with the arts and ideas of China's people, Megan Walsh, a brilliant young critic, shows us why it's important to finally pay attention to Chinese fiction--an exuberant drama that illustrates the complex relationship between art and politics, one that is increasingly shaping the West as well. Turns out, writers write neither what their government nor foreign readers want or expect, as they work on a different wavelength to keep alive ideas and events that are censored by the propaganda machine. The Subplot vividly captures the way in which literature offers an alternative--perhaps truer--way to understanding the contradictions that make up China itself.

From May Fourth to June Fourth

From May Fourth to June Fourth PDF Author: Ellen Widmer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674045165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
What do the Chinese literature and film inspired by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) have in common with the Chinese literature and film of the May Fourth movement (1918-1930)? This new book demonstrates that these two periods of the highest literary and cinematic creativity in twentieth-century China share several aims: to liberate these narrative arts from previous aesthetic orthodoxies, to draw on foreign sources for inspiration, and to free individuals from social conformity. Although these consistencies seem readily apparent, with a sharper focus the distinguished contributors to this volume reveal that in many ways discontinuity, not continuity, prevails. Their analysis illuminates the powerful meeting place of language, imagery, and narrative with politics, history, and ideology in twentieth-century China. Drawing on a wide range of methodologies, from formal analysis to feminist criticism, from deconstruction to cultural critique, the authors demonstrate that the scholarship of modern Chinese literature and film has become integral to contemporary critical discourse. They respond to Eurocentric theories, but their ultimate concern is literature and film in China's unique historical context. The volume illustrates three general issues preoccupying this century's scholars: the conflict of the rural search for roots and the native soil movement versus the new strains of urban exoticism; the diacritics of voice, narrative mode, and intertextuality; and the reintroduction of issues surrounding gender and subjectivity. Table of Contents: Preface Acknowledgments Introduction David Der-wei Wang part:1 Country and City 1. Visitation of the Past in Han Shaogong's Post-1985 Fiction Joseph S. M. Lau 2. Past, Present, and Future in Mo Yan's Fiction of the 1980s Michael S. Duke 3. Shen Congwen's Legacy in Chinese Literature of the 1980s Jeffrey C. Kinkley 4. Imaginary Nostalgia: Shen Congwen, Song Zelai, Mo Yan, and Li Yongping David Der-wei Wang 5. Urban Exoticism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature Heinrich Fruehauf part: 2 Subjectivity and Gender 6. Text, Intertext, and the Representation of the Writing Self in Lu Yun, Dafu,and Wang Meng Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker 7. Invention and Intervention: The Making of a Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature Lydia H. Liu 8. Living in Sin: From May Fourth via the Antirightist Movement to the Present Margaret H. Decker part: 3 Narrative Voice and Cinematic Vision 9. Lu Xun's Facetious Muse: The Creative Imperative in Modern Chinese Fiction Marston Anderson 10. Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature Theodore Huters 11. Melodramatic Representation and the "May Fourth" Tradition of Chinese Cinema Paul G. Pickowicz 12. Male Narcissism and National Culture: Subjectivity in Chen Kaige's King of the Children Rey Chow Afterword: Reflections on Change and Continuity in Modern Chinese Fiction Leo Ou-fan Lee Notes Contributors From May Fourth to June Fourth will he warmly welcomed. It should be of great interest to all concerned with literary developments in the contemporary world on the one hand, and on the other with the enigmas surrounding China's alternating attempts to develop and to destroy herself as a civilization. --Cyril Birch, University of California, Berkeley

Peach Blossom Paradise

Peach Blossom Paradise PDF Author: Ge Fei
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374706
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
An enthralling story of revolution, idealism, and a savage struggle for utopia by one of China's greatest living novelists. In 1898 reformist intellectuals in China persuaded the young emperor that it was time to transform his sclerotic empire into a prosperous modern state. The Hundred Days’ Reform that followed was a moment of unprecedented change and extraordinary hope—brought to an abrupt end by a bloody military coup. Dashed expectations would contribute to the revolutionary turn that Chinese history would soon take, leading in time to the deaths of millions. Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man has a great vision of reforging China as an egalitarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to make it real. It is his own plans, however, which come to nothing, and his “little sister” Xiumi is left to take up arms against a Confucian world in which women are chattel. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise.

A Novel Approach to China

A Novel Approach to China PDF Author: Gengsong Gao
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811665184
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book explores Chinese novelists’ distinctive contributions to the China debate in terms of the key issues of Chinese language, power dynamics and Confucian tradition. As China is rising, Chinese scholars and policymakers are debating heatedly over China’s past, present and future. Who are the major debaters? How do they analyze China’s problems and figure out solutions? What are the main achievements and weaknesses of the Chinese intellectual debate and discourse? Chinese novelists also get involved in the China debate. However, their voices are rarely heard. This book argues that, by dramatizing the diversities of ordinary social actors’ everyday languages, active discursive practices and enchanted local traditions, Chinese novelists do not merely illustrate the dominant liberal, the New Left and the New Confucian ideologies, but enrich the China debate and provide a “novel” approach to our understanding of modern China.

Modern China: All That Matters

Modern China: All That Matters PDF Author: Jonathan Clements
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1444187066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
In Modern China: All That Matters, Jonathan Clements presents China as the Chinese themselves see it. He explains the key issues of national reconstruction; the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, and the dizzying spectacle of China's economic reform. Clements offers a Chinese perspective on such events as the Handover of Hong Kong, and chronicles the historical events that continue to resonate today in Chinese politics, economics, culture and quality of life. A final chapter examines China's role in the global marketplace, its indirect effect on foreign economies from Australia to America to Africa, and its growing military might, with an assessment of the damage done to its environment and population. In his most provocative assertion, Clements suggests that China's contemporary problems are not the trials of a developing nation, but a possible vision of our own future. This accessible and readable book will appeal both to students and general readers, giving a fascinating introduction to modern China - and what matters most about it.

Copyright Matters

Copyright Matters PDF Author: Lena Henningsen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
literary reading of these "derivative" works and argues that imitation may, at times, be a creative tool. While these two central arguments appear to be contradictory, the author shows that they represent two sides of the same coin: the emergence of a new self-conception among Chinese authors, as they struggle to recast their relationship with society and state. --Book Jacket.

Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary

Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary PDF Author: Michael Berry
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031168593
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
During the early days of the COVID-19 health crisis, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary provided an important portal for people around the world to understand the outbreak, local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. But when news of the international publication of Wuhan Diary appeared online in early April of 2020, Fang Fang’s writings became the target of a series of online attacks by “Chinese ultra-nationalists.” Over time, these attacks morphed into one of the most sophisticated and protracted hate Campaigns against a Chinese writer in decades. Meanwhile, as controversy around Wuhan Diary swelled in China, the author was transformed into a global icon, honored by the BBC as one of the most influential women of 2020 and featured in stories by dozens of international news outlets. This book, by the translator of Wuhan Diary into English, alternates between a first-hand account of the translation process and more critical observations on how a diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate and the target of a sweeping online campaign that many described as a “cyber Cultural Revolution.” Eventually, even Berry would be pulled into the attacks and targeted by thousands of online trolls. This book answers the questions: why would an online lockdown diary elicit such a strong reaction among Chinese netizens? How did the controversy unfold and evolve? Who was behind it? And what can we learn from the “Fang Fang Incident” about contemporary Chinese politics and society? The book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, as well as anyone with special interest in translation, US-Chinese relations, or internet culture more broadly.