Title Criticism and Society: the Birth of the Modern Critical Subject in China Author(S)
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by HKU Scholars Hub Criticism and society: The birth of the modern critical subject in Title China Author(s) Tong, QS; Zhou, X Citation Boundary 2, 2002, v. 29 n. 1, p. 153-176 Issued Date 2002 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/42588 Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License Criticism and Society: The Birth of the Modern Critical Subject in China Q. S. Tong and Xiaoyi Zhou Over the past ten years or so, there have been repeated calls in China for the creation and establishment of a system of critical theory that bears distinct indigenous features, a system that is ‘‘national,’’ or ‘‘Chinese,’’ and that will therefore be different, both formally and substantively, from those imported critical approaches and theoretical formulations.1 However, these We thank Paul Bové, Jonathan Arac, and the anonymous readers of the boundary 2 edi- torial collective for their comments and suggestions. We also owe Meg Havran a note of thanks for editing the manuscript. Translations from Chinese sources, unless otherwise noted, are ours. 1. Articulations of the desire for an indigenous critical theory are copious. They started to be heard in the late 1980s and became a visible critical movement in the mid-1990s. In the first issue of Wenxue pinglun (Literary review) in 1997, the leading critical journal in China, for example, an entire section is devoted to the issue of how to modernize classi- cal Chinese critical theory. The following list of titles, albeit short and far from complete, is perhaps sufficient to show the solemnity and intensity of the issue for Chinese literary intellectuals: Cao Shunqing, ‘‘Ershiyi shiji zhongguo wenhua fazhanzhanlue yu chongjian zhongguo wenlun huayu’’ (Strategies for Chinese cultural developments in the twenty-first century and reconstruction of the discourse of Chinese literary theory), Dongfang cong- kan (Oriental series), no.
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