DOCSLIB.ORG

Queer Chinese Postsocialist Horizons: New Models of Same-Sex

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Queer Chinese Postsocialist Horizons: New Models of Same-Sex QUEER CHINESE POSTSOCIALIST HORIZONS: NEW MODELS OF SAME-SEX DESIRE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION, “SENTIMENTS LIKE WATER” AND BEIJING STORY by KYLE DUANE SHERNUK A THESIS Presented to the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts June 2012 THESIS APPROVAL PAGE Student: Kyle Duane Shernuk Title: Queer Chinese Postsocialist Horizons: New Models of Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, “Sentiments Like Water and Beijing Story This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures by: Deborah Tze-lan Sang Chair Maram Epstein Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2012 ii Copyright 2012 Kyle Duane Shernuk iii THESIS ABSTRACT Kyle Duane Shernuk Master of Arts Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures June 2012 Title: Queer Chinese Postsocialist Horizons: New Models of Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, “Sentiments Like Water” and Beijing Story This thesis represents an investigation into the strategies used by postsocialist Chinese male subjects to articulate their subjecthood and desires. The introduction explains the choice for using a phenomenological methodological approach in addressing the issue and also lays out the simultaneous goal of this thesis to inaugurate a move away from political allegorical interpretations as the standard for reading contemporary Chinese literature. The body chapters look at two different contemporary Chinese works to help illuminate the arrival of the Chinese subject. Using Wang Xiaobo's novella "Sentiments Like Water" and the anonymously penned online novel Beijing Story as case studies, this thesis investigates the ways alternative epistemologies and uses of history can undo pathological understandings of queerness and create new identities for Chinese subjects. The thesis concludes with thinking about the direction of the queer and Chinese studies fields and offers future points of investigation. iv CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Kyle Duane Shernuk GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Sichuan University, Chengdu, China Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China University of Kansas, Lawrence DEGREES AWARDED: Master of Arts, East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2012, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, East Asian Languages and Cultures, 2008, University of Kansas AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Republican Era and Contemporary Chinese Literature and Film, Queer, Post-Colonial, and Feminist Theory GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Chinese Government Scholarship, 2011-2012 Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship Recipient (FLAS) for Japanese Language Studies, University of Oregon, 2010-2011 Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Recipient for Chinese language Studies,Department of Education, Summer 2010 Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship Recipient (FLAS) for Chinese Language Studies at Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), 2009- 2010 Graduate Teaching Fellowship, East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2008-2009 v PUBLICATIONS: Shernuk, K. “The Pursuit of Pleasure: Perversion and Pathology in Wang Xiaobo’s ‘Sentiments Like Water’” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs. 11:2. (2011) vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Professors Sang and Epstein for their unwavering support and guidance in making my work achieve its highest potential. I also want to thank the University of Oregon Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS) for funding that allowed me to present parts of this thesis at two separate conferences. Feedback from these experiences was integral to the final product. I would finally like to thank Academia Sinica for their financial support and invitation to participate in their Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, which provided me a much needed methodology that was integral to completing this thesis. vii For my Mouton. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 Notes ............................................................................................................ 23 II. THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE: PERVERSE HORIZONS IN WANG XIAOBO’S “SENTIMENTS LIKE WATER” ………………............................ 25 Notes ............................................................................................................ 66 III. BUILDING A HISTORY: BREAKING TRADITIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF QUEER POSTSOCIALIST SUBJECTS IN BEIJING STORY .............................................................................................................. 70 Notes ............................................................................................................ 119 IV. NEW HORIZONS AND THE ARRIVAL OF POST-QUEERNESS ? ........ 123 Notes ............................................................................................................ 130 REFERENCES CITED ........................................................................................ 131 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This thesis represents the beginning of an investigation into what I call the queer horizons of contemporary China. Postsocialist mainland China is regularly inundated with an ever-increasing number of ideas, many of which are directly in competition with previous socialist values. Chief among these ideas is the notion of individualized desire.1 The recognition of personalized desires also inaugurates the emergence of endless subjectivities, the range of which reflects the coalescing of myriad conceptual forces, such as modernity, globalization, capitalism, socialism, and nationalism, as well as more concrete factors such as affect, language, aesthetics, and pleasure. A person’s understanding of and relationship to the above concepts works over time to delimit his/her perceived reality, and it is precisely this delimitation that establishes the Chinese subject’s horizon of perception. The scope of the present endeavor is limited to the investigation of two fictional literary works from the 1990s that display two different and queer horizons of understanding in postsocialist China. This opening chapter will first serve to elaborate the function of the metaphor of the horizon and my choice to use it to describe the postsocialist Chinese condition. The flexibility offered by the concept of horizons will also allow for segueing into a discussion and interrogation of terminologies used to describe queer realities, a topic which inevitably haunts discussions of queerness in inter- and trans-national contexts. I will conclude this chapter by introducing another main goal of this thesis, which is to decenter Fredric Jameson’s thesis about the nature of third world literature and direct attention to potential alternative reading methodologies. 1 The first chapter takes Wang Xiaobo’s novella “Sentiments Like Water” as its main focus and works to understand how alternative discursive regimes and aesthetic preferences can reshape the subject’s understanding of language and love. While Wang’s novella stands alone as a work worthy of analysis, when coupled with sixth-generation Chinese director Zhang Yuan’s adaptation of the novella into film, the contrast between the two end products helps to highlight the ways in which the varying forces mentioned above, specifically globalization and capitalism, come to bear on a creator’s intended artistic message. What I hope to ultimately prove with this chapter is that, underneath the foundations of political allegorical readings, alternative horizons of understanding engage this story differently and acquire meaning in different ways. It is these different understandings that in turn help the reader to clarify the character’s queer horizon and individualized epistemology. The second chapter will begin by looking more closely at how the various forces above have been described as coming to bear on the postsocialist Chinese subject by scholars from varying disciplines and attempt to synthesize the resulting complex of loaded terms into a more digestible form. What follows will be a close reading of the anonymously penned online novel Beijing Story, which relates the story of two men’s struggles in life and love and vividly highlights the conflicts that can emerge within a single subject whose allegiance to and understanding of the forces addressed above are unclear. Looking at this literary manifestation of the disorientation that occurs in subjects without a static view of the world, or guiding line, helps to illuminate the struggles faced by postsocialist Chinese subjects to understand individual desire and their creation of personal value systems. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of the strategy 2 employed by the protagonist Handong to create his new horizon and how it requires a new approach to the concept of history. What is queer about these horizons can be understood in more than one sense. While it can certainly refer to male same-sex desires and the emotions that are foregrounded in the stories, this does not entirely capture what is queer about the characters’ points of view. It is by looking to queer’s more recent academic appropriation,
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Uva-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)
    UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Red Sonic Trajectories - Popular Music and Youth in China de Kloet, J. Publication date 2001 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): de Kloet, J. (2001). Red Sonic Trajectories - Popular Music and Youth in China. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:08 Oct 2021 L4Trif iÏLK m BEGINNINGS 0 ne warm summer night in 1991, I was sitting in my apartment on the 11th floor of a gray, rather depressive building on the outskirts of Amsterdam, when a documentary on Chinese rock music came on the TV. I was struck by the provocative poses of Cui Jian, who blindfolded himself with a red scarf - stunned by the images of the crowds attending his performance, images that were juxtaposed with accounts of the student protests of June 1989; and puzzled, as I, a rather distant observer, always imagined China to be a totalitarian regime with little room for dissident voices.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • Dipartimento Di Studi Sull'asia Orientale
    Corso di Laurea in Interpretariato e Traduzione Editoriale, Settoriale Prova finale di Laurea L'individuo tra finito e infinito: proposta di traduzione e commento traduttologico di una selezione di scritti giovanili di Wang Xiaobo Relatore Ch. Prof. Nicoletta Pesaro Laureando Laura Boari Matricola 837999 Anno Accademico 2012 / 2013 2 摘要 王小波因心肌梗塞于 1997 年去世，享年 45 岁。他留给世人的大量文章﹑小 说和散文，传递了他对于人类存在问题的思考。本论文所要强调的，正是作者在 思考过程中诞生的重要想法。 王小波于 1979 年 6 月给未来妻子林银河写了一封信（见论文第一篇翻 译）。信中，作者所描写的青春插曲，后成为小说﹤我在荒岛上迎接黎明﹥（见 论文第二篇翻译）的灵感来源。1979 年 10 月 29 日，王小波给林银河写了另一封 信（见论文第三篇翻译）。信中关于人类存在意义和人性的思考，同样也是早期 小说﹤这辈子﹥（见论文第四篇翻译）的核心。这两封信和这两篇小说后分别被 收录在﹤爱你就像爱生命﹥及﹤黑铁时代﹥中，均在作者去世后出版。 本论文共三章。第一章是关于王小波的介绍和最影响他的件事的文化大革 命。第二章是我从中文到意大利语翻译的四篇文本。第三章是翻译评论。 3 Abstract When he died from an heart attack at the age of forty-five in 1997, Wang Xiaobo left to the public a wide collection of articles, essays and novellas. By writing those pieces he developed his own perceptions on human existence. With this dissertation we aim to highlight the main features of the thought of the author. The first translated text is a letter written by Wang Xiaobo to his future wife Li Yinhe, whom he would later marry, dated June 1979. Here, the author describes an episode of his early life that later inspired him to write the second text translated, the novella “Wo zai huangdao shang yingjie liming” 我 在 荒 岛 上 迎 接 黎 明 . The third translation is another letter to Li Yinhe dated 29th October, 1979. This letter reveals the author's perspective of concepts like the meaning of life and the human condition. These topics are all featured in the final text, the novella written when Wang Xiaobo was a young adult, “Zhe beizi”这辈子.
    [Show full text]
  • Master for Quark6
    Review essays s e The Subversive “Pleasure v i a t c n i of Thinking” e h p s c r e SEBASTIAN VEG p ang Xiaobo, born in 1952 in Beijing and one of in 1997, Wang Xiaobo the most widely read writers in China and the achieved a meteoric fame. WChinese-speaking world today, wrote in his His fiction and essays swept famous essay “The Silent Majority”: through campuses in China at a time when most students Most people are subjected to the benefits of speaking were disillusioned with the once they enter school at seven. In my case, I think it self-righteous social criticism Wang Xiaobo, happened even earlier, because ever since I can and cultural soul-searching Wang in Love remember, I was surrounded by people trumpeting at “roots” fiction of the 1980s. (3) and Bondage. the top of their voice, making a constant din. (…) He probably remains, ten From what they said, I learned that one mu of land years after his death, the most Translated and could produce 300 000 catties of grain; that was widely read and discussed with an when we began starving to death. All in all, since I author among students and introduction by was a child, I have not had much faith in spoken readers under 35, and has Hongling Zhang words. The sterner the tone and the louder the voice, gained recognition even from the less faith I had; this scepticism derived directly the initially hostile literary and Jason from my aching stomach. Compared with any act of establishment.
    [Show full text]
  • Sexualities in Underground Films in the Contemporary PR China
    Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Theses Department of Communication Spring 5-2011 Imagining Queerness: Sexualities in Underground Films in the Contemporary P. R. China Jin Zhao Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Zhao, Jin, "Imagining Queerness: Sexualities in Underground Films in the Contemporary P. R. China." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2011. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses/73 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. IMAGINING QUEERNESS: SEXUALITIES IN UNDERGROUND FILMS IN THE CONTEMPORARY P. R. CHINA By JIN ZHAO Under the Direction of Leonard R. Teel ABSTRACT In response to the globalizing queerness argument and the cultural specificity argument in queer cultural studies, this thesis examines the emerging modern queer identity and culture in the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) in an intercultural context. Recognizing Chinese queer culture as an unstable, transforming and complex collection of congruent and/or contesting meanings, not only originated in China but also traveling across cultures, this thesis aims to exorcise the reified images of Chinese queers, or tongzhi, to contribute to the understanding of a dynamic construction of Chinese queerness at the turn of a new century, and to lend insight on the complicity of the elements at play in this construction by analyzing the underground films with queer content made in the PRC.
    [Show full text]
  • UNDERSTANDING CHINA a Diplomatic and Cultural Monograph of Fairleigh Dickinson University
    UNDERSTANDING CHINA a Diplomatic and Cultural Monograph of Fairleigh Dickinson University by Amanuel Ajawin Ahmed Al-Muharraqi Talah Hamad Alyaqoobi Hamad Alzaabi Molor-Erdene Amarsanaa Baya Bensmail Lorena Gimenez Zina Ibrahem Haig Kuplian Jose Mendoza-Nasser Abdelghani Merabet Alice Mungwa Seddiq Rasuli Fabrizio Trezza Editor Ahmad Kamal Published by: Fairleigh Dickinson University 1000 River Road Teaneck, NJ 07666 USA April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-457-6945-7 The opinions expressed in this book are those of the authors alone, and should not be taken as necessarily reflecting the views of Fairleigh Dickinson University, or of any other institution or entity. © All rights reserved by the authors No part of the material in this book may be reproduced without due attribution to its specific author. THE AUTHORS Amanuel Ajawin is a diplomat from Sudan Ahmed Al-Muharraqi is a graduate student from Bahrain Talah Hamad Alyaqoobi is a diplomat from Oman Hamad Alzaabi a diplomat from the UAE Molor Amarsanaa is a graduate student from Mongolia Baya Bensmail is a graduate student from Algeria Lorena Gimenez is a diplomat from Venezuela Zina Ibrahem is a graduate student from Iraq Ahmad Kamal is a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Haig Kuplian is a graduate student from the United States Jose Mendoza-Nasser is a graduate student from Honduras Abdelghani Merabet is a graduate student from Algeria Alice Mungwa is a graduate student from Cameroon Seddiq Rasuli is a graduate student from Afghanistan Fabrizio Trezza is a graduate student from Italy INDEX OF
    [Show full text]
  • The Intertextual Narrator in Wang Xiaobo's Fiction by Xiaoqi Shen BA
    Title Page The Ironic Self: The Intertextual Narrator in Wang Xiaobo’s Fiction by Xiaoqi Shen B.A., Wuhan University, 2017 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts University of Pittsburgh 2019 Committee Membership Page UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This thesis was presented by Xiaoqi Shen It was defended on April 5, 2019 and approved by Thesis Advisor: Kun Qian, Ph.D., Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures Neil Doshi, Ph.D., Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures Minglu Gao, Ph.D., Department of History of Art and Architecture ii Copyright © by Xiaoqi Shen 2019 iii The Ironic Self: The Intertextual Narrator in Wang Xiaobo’s Fiction Xiaoqi Shen, M.A. University of Pittsburgh, 2019 Wang Xiaobo, a writer whose many works earned renown only after his death, was invoked in multiple cultural debates. Some critics argue that Wang’s popularity among the urban middle class since the 1990s comes from the fact that his way of thinking and the complexity of narrative satisfy the tastes of urban elites; while others suggest that his eccentricity – in both life and works – is attractive to readers in a newly individualistic generation. This paper tries to examine Wang’s searching for the independence of spirit by analyzing his narrative strategy. Wang’s intertextual narrator Wang Er, generally considered as the author’s alter ego, is granted much authority that allows him to intrude and comment on the stories.
    [Show full text]
  • Wang 00FM:Wang
    INTRODUCTION On April 11, 1997, in his suburban Beijing apartment, Wang Xiaobo died of a sudden heart attack. That May he would have celebrated his forty-fifth birthday and the debut of a three- volume collection of his fiction, which had been rejected in vari- ous forms by more than twenty publishers. His death shocked his friends in addition to a growing readership, who had begun to know his name through his satiric essays, models of the revived zawen genre, an important vehicle in twentieth-century China for making social commentary and initiating intellectual trends. More than a hundred newspapers and magazines throughout the country reported the loss of an original thinker and literary pio- neer and noted the posthumous publication of his novellas. Within months his fame had spread throughout China. Since then nearly all his work has been published and kept in print. His trilogy, comprising two novella collections and a novel—The Golden Age, The Silver Age, and The Bronze Age— sold eighty thousand copies in its first printing and was selected as one of the ten most influential books of 1997 in China. Two zawen collections, My Spiritual Home and The Silent Majority, published that same year, remain best sellers. To this day the so- called Wang Xiaobo fever hasn’t cooled any. He has become a cult figure among university students and a cultural phenomenon at the turn of the new century. The popularity of his fiction in particular had been slow in coming, though, and the interest he generated on university campuses as a novelist did not mean in China acceptance by the literary establishment, which was located elsewhere.
    [Show full text]
  • Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012)
    Infrastructures of Critique: Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012) by Elizabeth Chamberlin Parke A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Elizabeth Chamberlin Parke 2016 Infrastructures of Critique: Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012) Elizabeth Chamberlin Parke Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This dissertation is a story about relationships between artists, their work, and the physical infrastructure of Beijing. I argue that infrastructure’s utilitarianism has relegated it to a category of nothing to see, and that this tautology effectively shrouds other possible interpretations. My findings establish counter-narratives and critiques of Beijing, a city at once an immerging global capital city, and an urban space fraught with competing ways of seeing, those crafted by the state and those of artists. Statecraft in this dissertation is conceptualized as both the art of managing building projects that function to control Beijing’s public spaces, harnessing the thing-power of infrastructure, and the enforcement of everyday rituals that surround Beijinger’s interactions with the city’s infrastructure. From the spectacular architecture built to signify China’s neoliberal approaches to globalized urban spaces, to micro-modifications in how citizens sort their recycling depicted on neighborhood bulletin boards, the visuals of Chinese statecraft saturate the urban landscape of Beijing. I advocate for heterogeneous ways of seeing of infrastructure that releases its from being solely a function of statecraft, to a constitutive part of the artistic practices of: Song Dong (宋冬 b.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction: Opening Public Spaces
    China Perspectives 2010/1 | 2010 Independent Chinese Cinema: Filming in the “Space of the People” Introduction: Opening Public Spaces Sebastian Veg Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/5047 DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.5047 ISSN: 1996-4617 Publisher Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine Printed version Date of publication: 21 April 2010 ISSN: 2070-3449 Electronic reference Sebastian Veg, « Introduction: Opening Public Spaces », China Perspectives [Online], 2010/1 | 2010, Online since 01 April 2013, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ chinaperspectives/5047 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.5047 © All rights reserved Special Feature s e v Introduction: i a t c n i e Opening Public Spaces h p s c r SEBASTIAN VEG e p ne may well wonder why a journal devoted to con - the censorship system. (4) However, this form of independence temporary Chinese politics and society would does not appear to be a central tenet of how they view their Ochoose to publish a feature on Chinese cinema of work: both Zhang Yuan with Seventeen Years (Guonian hui - the last two decades. Many young independent directors have jia ) in 1999 and Jia Zhangke with The World (Shijie ) in on the contrary been intent on highlighting the artistic quality 2003 chose to enter the official circuit to bring their films to of their work rather than its political significance. Their films a larger audience; other directors offered this opportunity have been badly distributed and irregularly circulated in would no doubt make the same choice, and many have collab - China; they cannot even be considered an element of the cul - orated with state-run studios on an ad-hoc basis.
    [Show full text]
  • University of California
    UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Performing Perversion: Decadence in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/89r2b0jj Author Wang, Hongjian Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Performing Perversion: Decadence in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Hongjian Wang September 2012 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Perry Link, Chairperson Dr. Paul Pickowicz Dr. Susan Zieger Copyright by Hongjian Wang 2012 The Dissertation of Hongjian Wang is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements This dissertation is the result of an academic adventure that is deeply indebted to the guidance of all my three committee members. Dr. Susan Zieger ushered me into the world of Western Decadence in the late nineteenth century. Dr. Paul Pickowicz instilled into me a strong interest in and the methodology of cultural history studies. Dr. Perry Link guided me through the palace of twentieth-century Chinese literature and encouraged me to study Decadence in modern Chinese literature in comparison with Western Decadence combining the methodology of literary studies and cultural history studies. All of them have been extremely generous in offering me their valuable advices from their expertise, which made this adventure eye-opening and spiritually satisfying. My special gratitude goes to Dr. Link. His broad knowledge and profound understanding of Chinese literature and society, his faith in and love of seeking the truth, and his concern about the fate of ordinary people are inexhaustible sources of inspiration to me.
    [Show full text]
  • Literary Quality of Qi from Tang Tales of Marvels to Wang Xiaobo's Tang
    Transgression in Texts: Literary Quality of Qi from Tang Tales of Marvels to Wang Xiaobo’s Tang Tales by Xiaowen Xu A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Xiaowen Xu 2014 Transgression in Texts: Literary Quality of Qi from Tang Tales of Marvels to Wang Xiaobo’s Tang Tales Xiaowen Xu Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto 2014 ABSTRACT The modern Chinese writer, Wang Xiaobo (1952-1997), retold three tales from the Tang dynasty (618-907) twice during the last two decades of the twentieth century. In this dissertation I examine the intertextual and intratextual relations between these tales and find that Wang Xiaobo’s efforts at literary adaptation belong to a long tradition of Chinese fiction writing in which the writer’s perceptions of the world are displayed through transformative experiments with language, genre, and reader’s expectations, experiments based on the pursuit of qi 奇 (“the marvelous”) in Chinese narrative literature. The literary quality of qi was first associated with Tang chuanqi 傳奇, or Tang tales of marvels. The Tang literati made use of shared literary knowledge in writing the Tang tales, and by engaging a literary spirit of you 遊 (“freedom of roaming”) in transgressing generic restrictions imposed by their classical education, they were able to present new perspectives on their own world. I argue that it is the pursuit of the literary quality of qi in Tang tales that makes transgression possible for the Tang literati in textual, generic, and thematic terms.
    [Show full text]