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©2010 Ping Zhu ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©2010 Ping Zhu ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WOMEN AND THE NIHIL THE SHADOW SUBJECT IN CHINESE LITERARY MODERNITY, 1915-1936 by PING ZHU A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In Partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature Written under the Direction of Professor Ban Wang And Approved by ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2010 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION WOMAN AND NIHIL: THE SHADOW SUBJECT IN CHINESE LITERARY MODERNITY, 1915-1936 By PING ZHU Dissertation Director: Ban Wang My dissertation examines how the feminine was invoked as a representational strategy to cope with the nihilism lying at the heart of Chinese modernity in the period from 1915 to 1936. As a revolution on both the individual level and the social level, Chinese modernity began with and continued in crisis. One imperative of Chinese modernity was to ceaselessly bring excitement and passion to the individual, urging and enticing the latter to join the nationalist project. However, this idealist endeavor demanded more power than the individual could summon within a coherent and rational consciousness. The individual was forced to confront decentering or shattering experiences of revolution, which were impossible to represent. Therefore, the nihil lied at the heart of modern Chinese subjectivity. In the West, nihilism emerged as a psychological effect to the decline of belief; but in May Fourth China, nihilism emerged a response to the belief in a heightened spirit that is incommensurate with any practical ii goals. However, the very nihilistic experience had to be disguised or shielded to ensure the purity and sublimity of the revolution. The trope of woman was employed as a metonymy for the nihil, which gave birth to a “shadow subject” (an unconscious agency of the subject) that was different from the ideal masculine and rational one. On the one hand, the projection of nihil onto woman further alienated and mystified the feminine; on the other hand, it empowered the feminine and incorporated woman into the mainstream of revolutionary discourse. Therefore, not only male writers used the representation of woman to overcome the traumatic nihilistic experience in their subjectivity, some female writers also integrated the nihil in their self-representation as a strategy to empower themselves. In my dissertation, I engage myself in a re-reading of selective modern Chinese literary works. Combining the theoretical strength of post-structuralism, existentialism, and feminism, my dissertation aims to deconstruct and reconstruct subjectivity, narrative, and revolutionary discourse in modern China. The discovery of the relation between woman and nihil provides a new perspective to reexamine the construction of modern subjectivity, as well as the gender relations in Chinese modernity. iii AKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to Prof. Ban Wang, my dissertation director, for his consistent intellectual guidance. His incisive comments helped me to develop my ideas. His encouragement, understanding, and patience had miraculously made my dissertation writing a pleasant experience. My heartiest gratitude goes to Prof. Janet Walker, who meticulously read and edited my manuscript twice and pushed me to revise my writing. Prof. Xun Liu and Prof. Weijie Song had been wonderful critical readers of my dissertation and I have benefited greatly from their comments. I’m grateful to the Program of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, which had been the home of my intellectual development in the last seven years. Prof. Elin Diamond had indirectly helped me to reshape my arguments when she edited my grant proposals and listened to my mock job talk. The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers generously offered me Teaching Assistantship for three executive years, which funded my dissertation writing. I therefore thank Prof. Ching-I Tu and Prof. Richard Simmons for being so supportive. I also would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, especially Professor Dietrich Tschanz and Dr. Yuru Wu, for their gracious support. A revised portion of Chapter One was published under the title “Traversing the Sublime: The Metamorphosis of the Female Body in Lu Xun’s “Regrets for the Past” in New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 12.2 (2010). iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v Introduction 1 Woman and Nihil: The Shadow Subject of Chinese Literary Modernity Chapter One 23 Traversing the Sublime: The Metamorphosis of the Female Body in Lu Xun’s “Regrets for the Past” Chapter Two 69 The Object of Absence: The Nationalist Identification in Yu Dafu and Zhang Ziping’s Early Stories Chapter Three 119 Plumbing the Abject: The Modern Woman and Its Other in Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying’s Stories Chapter Four 160 “There is No Truth for Woman”: Bai Wei and the Feminine Revolutionary Impulse Conclusion 207 Bibliography 212 Curriculum Vita 226 v 1 Introduction: Woman and Nihil The Shadow Subject of Chinese Literary Modernity The history of modern China bears the conspicuous mark of colonial modernity. When Chinese reformers started to envision and discuss Chinese modernity at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, they did so within a set of borrowed terms from the West. The borrowed discourses of enlightenment, individualism, subjectivity, social equality, and nation-states, however, came into collision with the historical urgency of (national) survival in China. On the one hand, one common characteristic of the discourses of Western modernity is that they feature a unilinear mode of progress and development of the nation, society, and individual, aiming at a continuous ascending movement toward a luminous future. On the other hand, the national and social crisis demands a discontinuity in history, a revolution – rather than an evolution, as implied in the enlightenment discourse – of both the superstructure and the base, both the public and the private, both the political and the personal. This mission is heralded by a desire to undo existing institutions, to sever the past from the present, and to radically vacuum one’s self before embracing the new. Literary historians call the above contradiction the contradiction between enlightenment and national salvation (qimeng he jiuwang) 1 . The two seemingly incommensurate missions, one continuous and one disruptive, worked together to 1 See Li Zehou, “Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangchong bianzou,” 32-34. 2 produce the special conditions of Chinese modernity. More than anything else, they caused a crisis of representation. In this context, the question becomes not merely what to represent, but who represents and in which way? Hegel located the core of modernity in the principle of “subjectivity” – a principle which carried with it mainly the connotations of individualism, critical-rational competence and autonomy of action (d'Entrèves & Benhabib, 61). But if revolution is on the agenda, then the subject of representation is simultaneously the object of revolution. The individual not only has to deal with an emerging new world which he feels powerless to represent, but also the rupture in his own self that deprives him of his power of representation. This model of subjectivity is obviously more complicated than the Hegelian rational and autonomous subjectivity. In fact, it is only within the dialectic of the possibility and impossibility of representation that the subjectification of the individual takes place. The theme of my dissertation, “woman and nihil,” explores the central problem of subjectification qua representation. Both woman and the nihil mark the aporia of representation. The specter of nihilism entered the horizon of Chinese history almost at the same time as the dawning of Chinese modernity. The nihil indicates the negation of values and meanings; it constitutes a revolt against reason and enlightenment. In China, nihilism is not simply an indicator of the experience of disillusionment against the increasingly rationalized and instrumentalized world, as in the West; it is, rather, a grounding principle and a constitutive substance for the emergent modern Chinese 3 subjectivity. The experience of the nihil, as a matter of fact, played a decisive role in the formation of modern Chinese subjectivity. The trope of the new woman, on the other hand, represents a radical otherness in history. Emerging in the 1910s, this trope embodies a double negation: she is the modern substitute for the traditional Chinese woman, in that she is not traditional; and she is a mesmerizing other to modern Chinese man. Therefore, the very radical otherness is its legitimacy. Although the trope of woman was initially invented by male reformers as an integral part of the nationalist agenda, it had never been completely in the control of the masculine discourse. Rather, the trope of woman frequently reminds the male writers of the limits of their power of representation as a form of domination. In modern China, the nihil as fundamental subjective experience and woman as a prominent literary trope are not two isolated cultural phenomena. Not only are the two of them closely connected with each other, but they also are constitutive of the emerging modern subjectivity. As Andrew
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