China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Julia F. Andrews, Ohio State University
Lingzhen Wang, Cornell University
Qiu Jin (1877–1907) has been both praised and studied as a symbol of the republican revolutionary cause and a pioneer of Chinese women’s emancipation. Also a talented writer, she left behind numerous poems (shi), lyrics (ci), political articles, familiar essays in the vernacular, song lyrics, a biographical story, and an autobiographical tan-ci fiction. These date from her girlhood up to her execution, and show very different self-images, desires and ideals at various stages in her life, indicating a constant self-negotiation and transformation. Even though Qiu Jin ended her life as a nationalist revolutionary, her journey through life was much more complicated than any one single term can define.
What kinds of life choice were available to women at the very end of the late imperial China? What did Qiu Jin, as an educated, talented and unhappy young wife, see in the republican revolutionary cause to which she devoted herself? What does nationalist revolution really mean to her? Did she envision herself as a talented writer, a feminist, or a revolutionary? How did her self-perception change?
In this paper, I will, through studying Qiu Jin’s autobiographical writings including all of her poems and lyrics, her letters to her relatives and friends, and her tan-ci fiction, trace out a trajectory (which does not indicate any order) of Qiu Jin’s subjective life and self-negotiations in different stages of her life, untangle the constructed myth of her as a self-determined national hero and revolutionary martyr, and illustrate her personal struggles over the ideas and embodiment of nation, women and self. In addition, I will also examine the historical significance and contingency of feminism and nationalism in a specific context—China at the turn of the century, and their particular relationship to a particular woman, Qiu Jin.
Ling Xiao, Brown University
Lu Xun is the most widely studied modern Chinese writer. Previous scholarship, however, has primarily focused on Lu Xun as an author and on his texts. My study moves beyond these author- and text-oriented studies to explore other factors that create meaning in Lu Xun’s work. More specifically, I plan to make Lu Xun a case study in the complex processes of the production and consumption of May Fourth literature. By examining the cultural network which produced Lu Xun’s early short stories as well as the critical responses to them, I will highlight the important roles cultural agents such as editors and critics played in shaping the meanings of Lu Xun’s early work and making otherwise complex and difficult literary texts accessible to the reading public.
Most of Lu Xun’s fiction first appeared serially in two journals, New Youth and the Morning Gazette Supplement. Unlike a book, the content of which is fixed for one edition, a journal consists of broad and continuous discourses which editors shape as they select, edit materials, arrange the contents, and offer editorial notes. Journal readers always read intertextually. That is, they not only read a text published in one issue, but also other articles in that issue and in previous issues. Both the direct comments on the text and the general themes of the journal, therefore, influence interpretation. Critics also offer their supposedly authoritative interpretations. They not only guide the reading experience of individual readers but also elevate the diverse and possibly uncertain responses in the reader’s mind to the level of coherent and concrete meanings that will enter public consciousness.
In this paper, I will argue that the meanings and influence of Lu Xun’s early work were not established when it made its first public appearance, but rather evolved through such journalistic discourses. By focusing on Lu Xun’s relationships with the editors of New Youth and the Morning Gazette Supplement, and the critical responses to "The Diary of A Madman" and other stories in his first collection of short stories, Outcry, I will demonstrate the process of meaning-making by the editors and critics. I will also consider their effort to make these writings part of the general radical discourse on the evils of Chinese cultural tradition.
Xueqing Xu, University of Toronto
In 1922, a group of Chinese scholars that had been educated in America launched a journal named Xue Heng (Critical Review) with the aim of counteracting the May 4th new cultural movement. seventy-nine issues appeared over eleven years. Their arguments were immediately and summarily rejected by the May 4th leaders. Lu Xun, the idol of the new cultural movement, in an article entitled "Evaluation of Xue Heng" harshly satirized the School for its lack of critical gradations. Since then, the School has generally been labelled "conservative" for its defence of the essence of traditional Chinese culture ("national essence").
My paper will argue that the analysis and criticism by the school of the new May 4th theories on Chinese culture, language, literature, and national identity are systematic and scholarly rigorous, and that today, seventy years later, some of their arguments still appear valid and of basic interest. That applies especially to their questioning of concepts by the May 4th advocates of the binary opposition between "national essence" and Westernized modernity, science and religion, and the vernacular and classical language forms. The old should not be totally rejected in favour of the new, but past and future creatively interrelated. They too wished "to . . . assimilate the standard works and best ideas of Western philosophy and literature", but, as their journal proclaimed, "to create a modern Chinese prose style, capable of expressing new ideas and sentiments, yet retaining the traditional usage and inherent beauty of the language."
Laikwan Pang, Hong Kong University
This paper analyzes the cultural manifestation of the suicides of two famous female film stars in Shanghai in the 1930s and attempts to delineate the relationship between the public readings of the two suicides and the ideology of the left-wing cinema movement taking place at that time. Ai Xia, famous for her defiant image both on-screen and off-screen, committed suicide in 1934. The left-wing director Cai Chusheng adapted her tragic life onto the screen. The heroine of the film was performed by the celebrated Ruan Lingyu, who committed suicide right after the screening of this film. A large scale public discourse was generated in Shanghai immediately; while Ai Xia’s inability to shed her former May Fourth petit bourgeoisie femininity was held responsible for her death, Ruan Lingyu’s suicide was celebrated as her subversive act to use her life to protest against the feudal society. This paper aims less at re-discovering the "historical facts" that lead to their deaths than at analyzing the complicated cultural network pre-determining the public readings on the two suicides: the private lives of the actresses were connected to the ideology governing the fictional roles they performed on the screen. This paper shows that the stardoms of the two actresses were, and still are, products of the left-wing cinema movement; their public images have been inevitably diffused by the philosophy of this intellectual movement. Reading the public discourse generated by the deaths of the two actresses reveals how gender issues were secretly intertwined with the presumably male and nationalist discourse.
Evelynne Xiaoping Song, Whitman College
The power of historiography lies in its chronological flux which mirrors the progression of history. The fictional historiography in its unmistakable effort to mimic that process relies on chronology for its artistic credibility. However, the first person narrator in Chinese historiographic fiction which appeared in the 1980s and 90s has deconstructed the seemingly uninterrupted flow of history and made historiography an anachronic re-experience of the past. The anachronism in the historiographic fiction effectively links the past with the present and enables the first person narrator’s direct participation in the process of recreating history (family history) through fictional discourse.
My paper will investigate three well-known fictional historiographies from that period in an entirely new perspective. The three fictional works are: Mo Yan’s "Red Sorghum,"1 Su Tong’s "Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes" and Ye Zhaoyan’s "The Story of Date Trees." For Mo Yan’s anachronic first person narrator, the representation of his grandparents’ stories is an experience of moral purification and spiritual redemption. By reviving the grandparents’ past glory, he has proved his worthiness of being their filial descendant. The quest for the anachronic first person narrator in "Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes" is to recreate a past which was long lost during the process of migration from the rural regions to the cities in China’s Southeast. Through textual recreation, the anachronic first person narrator is able to be in touch and communicating with people of the previous generations. Ye Zhaoyan’s story is about the re-evaluation of the past. The first person narrator anachronizes the history and juxtaposes different versions of the same story from opposing views so as to allow readers to re-experience the past and understand better the present.
1. My analysis of Mo Yan’s story will be based on the novella "Red Sorghum." For the original text, see Mo Yan, "Red Sorghum," People’s Literature 3 (1983).