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Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: a Critical Survey

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Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: a Critical Survey CHINESE LITERATURE IN THE SECOND HALF OF A MODERN CENTURY A CRITICAL SURVEY Edited by PANG-YUAN CHI and DAVID DER-WEI WANG INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS • BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS William Tay’s “Colonialism, the Cold War Era, and Marginal Space: The Existential Condition of Five Decades of Hong Kong Literature,” Li Tuo’s “Resistance to Modernity: Reflections on Mainland Chinese Literary Criticism in the 1980s,” and Michelle Yeh’s “Death of the Poet: Poetry and Society in Contemporary China and Taiwan” first ap- peared in the special issue “Contemporary Chinese Literature: Crossing the Bound- aries” (edited by Yvonne Chang) of Literature East and West (1995). Jeffrey Kinkley’s “A Bibliographic Survey of Publications on Chinese Literature in Translation from 1949 to 1999” first appeared in Choice (April 1994; copyright by the American Library Associ- ation). All of the essays have been revised for this volume. This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2000 by David D. W. Wang All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chinese literature in the second half of a modern century : a critical survey / edited by Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-253-33710-0 (alk. paper) 1. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Ch’i, Pang-yüan. II. Wang, Te-wei, David. PL2303 .C42646 2000 895.1’09005—dc21 99-058462 1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 00 CONTENTS Preface by Pang-yuan Chi ix Acknowledgments xi Editors’ Note xii Introduction by David Der-wei Wang xiii 1. FAREWELL TO THE GODS 1 Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory’s Fin-de-siècle Struggle Zaifu Liu 2. TAIWAN LITERATURE, 1945–1999 14 Pang-yuan Chi 3. COLONIALISM, THE COLD WAR ERA, 31 AND MARGINAL SPACE The Existential Condition of Five Decades of Hong Kong Literature William Tay 4. REINVENTING NATIONAL HISTORY 39 Communist and Anti-Communist Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century David Der-wei Wang 5. THE SCHOOL AND THE HOSPITAL 65 On the Logics of Socialist Realism Su Wei 6. MODERNISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 76 Taiwan Literature in the 1960s Ko Ch’ing-ming 7. BEYOND “NATIVIST REALISM” 96 Taiwan Fiction in the 1970s and 1980s Yang Chao vi | CONTENTS 8. SEARCHING FOR ROOTS 110 Anticultural Return in Mainland Chinese Literature of the 1980s Li Qingxi 9. RE-MEMBERING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION 124 Chinese Avant-garde Literature of the 1980s Wu Liang 10. RESISTANCE TO MODERNITY 137 Reflections on Mainland Chinese Literary Criticism in the 1980s Li Tuo 11. FEMINISM AND FEMALE TAIWAN WRITERS 146 Chung Ling 12. BREAKING OPEN 161 Chinese Women’s Writing in the Late 1980s and 1990s Jingyuan Zhang 13. THE CULTURAL IMAGINARY OF A CITY 180 Reading Hong Kong Through Xi Xi Stephen C. K. Chan 14. ANSWERING THE QUESTION 193 What Is Chinese Postmodernism/Post-Mao-Dengism? Xiaobin Yang 15. DEATH OF THE POET 216 Poetry and Society in Contemporary China and Taiwan Michelle Yeh CONTENTS | vii APPENDIX 239 A Bibliographic Survey of Publications on Chinese Literature in Translation from 1949 to 1999 Jeffrey C. Kinkley Contributors 309 Index 311 PREFACE PANG-YUAN CHI In the last week of December 1993, more than three hundred people gathered in Taipei for an unprecedented conference on modern Chinese literature. The weather was cold, but hearts were warm and expectations were high. The event was unusual because of its ambitious range of topics and its participants—it drew not only writers and scholars from Hong Kong, the United States, and Europe, but also a large group from mainland China. A meeting like this would have been beyond anyone’s wildest expectations in the forty years after the “great divide,” the year 1949, in which the Chinese Communists seized the Chinese mainland and the Nationalist government moved its base to Taiwan. An abrupt and total severance of all ties across the Taiwan Straits was followed by decades of political antagonism and great turmoil on the mainland, though Taiwan experienced a very different development. Its two million people, who were mainly civil servants and soldiers, were allowed no contact even with family members for almost four decades. It was not until after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution in late 1978, then the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, that the first signs of a thaw in mainland China appeared, reflected in its literature. After these two major events, communications were reopened with the Chinese mainland, and cross-Straits family reunions were allowed. Starting from this time, Chinese writers began to broaden their scope of literary challenges. Overseas travel became more frequent; old totems and taboos that formerly dominated the two sides began to be re- examined, and very often were jettisoned. Literary creation became invig- orated by a new vitality and diversity. This volume is inspired by the spirit of the conference. Half of the sixteen essays are derived from the papers presented at the conference; others were solicited especially for the volume. All have been substan- tially revised and expanded to reflect the broader range of Chinese literary mutations from the late 1940s to the late 1990s. These essays endeavor to sum up the complex chronology of the highly heterogeneous Chinese reality through the literary portrayal of life on both sides of the Straits, in x | PREFACE Hong Kong, and among the Chinese scattered overseas, as reflected in the works of expatriate writers—often termed “Diaspora literature”—either with or without a strong, tearful “obsession with China.” We hope, as expressed in one of the conference’s opening speeches, that in the coming century, Chinese literature will be written in the qingfeng [clear breeze], on jingtu [blessed land], and with xiyue [delight]. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors wish to thank The Cultural Foundation of United Daily News Group for its generous funding of this volume at various stages. Particu- larly we want to express gratitude to Dr. Yu-ming Shaw and Dr. Chieh- ming Chen for their support. Thanks are also due to Michael Berry, Letty Chen, Carlos Rojas, Weijie Song, and Xiaojue Wang for editorial assistance. John Gallman, Jane Lyle, and Michael Nelson of Indiana University Press were extremely helpful when the manuscript was being prepared for publication. Our final thanks go to all the scholars and translators who enthusiastically participated in this project. P.C.P. D.D.W. EDITORS’ NOTE Contributors’ names have been left in the order and transliteration (Wade- Giles or pinyin) originally given, consistent with the authors’ preferences and the way they are known in the literary community. Throughout this collection, names are spelled according to the pinyin system. In essays where names were originally spelled according to the Wade-Giles system, the pinyin version, followed by the Wade-Giles version in parentheses, is used at the first occurrence of the name. Thereafter, only pinyin is used. INTRODUCTION DAVID DER-WEI WANG This volume, a preliminary survey of modern Chinese literature in the second half of the twentieth century, has three goals: to introduce figures, works, movements, and debates that have constituted Chinese literature from 1949 to the end of the century; to depict the enunciative endeavors, ranging from ideological treatises to avant-garde experiments, that have informed the discourse of Chinese cultural politics; and to observe the historical factors affecting the interplay of Chinese (post)modernities across communities: on the mainland, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and overseas. Given the complex development of Chinese literature over the past half- century, it is impossible to present an exhaustive account of either historical data or theoretical issues. Therefore, this collection of essays intends to map the scholarly paths already trodden or ready to be explored, and thus to anticipate the scope of critical inquiry in the years to come. The existing paradigm of Chinese literary studies treats the May Fourth Movement as the harbinger of literary modernization, and 1949—the year of the Chinese Communist seizure of mainland China—as the point when this modernization came to an abrupt end. Chinese literature after 1949 is said to be so conditioned by political antagonism and historical turmoil that it lacks the formal and conceptual rigor it had before. Such a scenario treats twentieth-century literary development as two separate and discrete segments, a Pre-1949 Era and a Post-1949 Era. This is an ill-informed notion. Although Chinese literature after 1949 has suffered from numer- ous political interventions, most poignantly attested to in the atrocities of the Great Cultural Revolution, mainland Chinese writers never ceased to produce significant work when given half a chance. Meanwhile, since mid-century, writers in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and overseas have contrib- uted some of the most stimulating works in the corpus of twentieth- century Chinese literature. Over the past two decades, mainland Chinese literature—which proclaimed the 1980s as yet another “New Era”—has, at last, again received critical admiration.
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