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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ How to read modern Chinese literature in English? The women beside/s modernism Tan, Teck Heng Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 HOW TO READ MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE IN ENGLISH? THE WOMEN BESIDE/S MODERNISM TAN TECK HENG (B.A. (Hons.), National University of Singapore; M.A., National University of Singapore) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE JOINT DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE AND DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE KING’S COLLEGE LONDON 2021 Supervisors: Dr Tania Roy Dr Sebastian Matzner Examiners: Dr Gilbert Yeoh Guan Hin Dr John Connor Professor B. Venkat Mani, University of Wisconsin-Madison Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and it has been written by me in its entirety. I have duly acknowledged all the sources of information which have been used in the thesis. This thesis has also not been submitted for any degree in any university previously. _______________________ Tan Teck Heng 22 June 2021 i ii Acknowledgements My studies were made possible by the generous financial support from institutions that are dedicated to promoting research in the humanities. I thank the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation for funding my undergraduate studies and the National University of Singapore for funding my master’s and doctoral programmes. The seeds of this thesis were sown in 2016 when my supervisor, Tania Roy, put Eileen Chang on the syllabus for the introductory module to literary studies. My experience teaching the module led to my interest in the Chinese women who wrote in English. I owe much to Tania for inspiring my topic and for guiding me through the world of academia. Her cutting intellect, expansive knowledge, and her sensitivity as a mentor, were critical to my development as a researcher and teacher. I am also immensely grateful to my other supervisor, Sebastian Matzner, for helping me find my black cat in a dark room. He taught me that a thesis is built on the modesties of careful word choices, a defensible sentence, a mission statement, and on writing as daily practice. His meticulous comments on my drafts demonstrate for me what scholarly engagement can and should be: kind, constructive, rigorous, and nuanced. It is my privilege to have Gilbert Yeoh, John Connor, B. Venkat Mani, and John Whalen-Bridge engage so seriously and earnestly with my work during the oral defence. Their encouragement and astute suggestions have transformed my thinking about what form my research will take in the future. My project also benefitted from the insights shared by numerous other scholars. Thank you to the following people: Susan Ang, for her guidance and iii her fascinating lecture on Chang’s aesthetics of desolation; Mie Hiramoto, for nurturing me as a researcher; Heidi Stalla, for alerting me to the story behind Ling Shuhua’s friendship scroll; James Rakoczi, for telling me about John Connor’s illuminating course, “Realism and its Others in the Long Twentieth Century”; John Phillips, Kevin Riordan, Nan Zhang, Anne Witchard, Cera Tan, Grace Lim, and Phoebe Pua for their feedback on my presentations; Kathrine Ojano, for being my partner in crime during the halcyon days of doing coursework; Rebecca Seah, for the conversations on Chang; Lim Ren Ying, for proofreading parts of my thesis; Raymund Vitorio and Rowland Imperial, for their constant support throughout my graduate studies. Academic life would have been far more difficult without the aid of the administrative staff at the National University of Singapore, who are always warm and generous with their time. My thanks to Pamela Pereira, Pearly Ang, Angeline Ang, Audrey Lee, Fatimah Ahmad, Yau Geok Hwa, and Sally Cheng, for helping me secure funding at various junctures and for assisting with administrative matters. I also thank the supportive community at King’s College London; Anna Katila, Shadya Radhi, Hannah Burke- Tomlinson, Haya Alfarhan, Riognach Sachs, Julian Neuhauser, and Caroline Laurent have all made my residency at King’s a stimulating and fruitful one. Finally, thank you to Weng for modelling scholarly restraint, intellectual rigour, self-reflexivity, and above all, kindness and patience, and thank you to my parents, for learning how to understand and love their son in both Chinese and English. iv Table of Contents Summary .......................................................................................................... ix Note on Chinese Names .................................................................................. xi Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 The Mid-Century Anglophonic Turn ..................................................... 8 Actor-Network Theory and Literary Studies ....................................... 22 Between Wars and Worlds................................................................... 33 The Cultural Cold War and Anglophone Chinese Writing .................. 42 Cold War Orientalism and Native Informancy .................................... 47 The Tyrannies and Freedoms of Writing in English ............................ 56 Beyond the Transpacific: China, England, Singapore ......................... 62 Beside/s Modernism............................................................................. 80 Chapter One Beside/s Men, Between Women .................................................................... 91 The Roof Garden Party Photograph: A Reading in Three Acts........... 97 The Second Act: Against Eurocentrism and Androcentrism ............. 102 The Third Act: Recovering Transnational Feminist Net/Works........ 108 Towards Postcritical Approaches to Recovery Work ........................ 121 Chapter Two Beside/s the European Historical Novel: Chinese Women’s Life Writing as “Modest History” .............................. 131 Why Read Chinese Women’s Life Writing? ..................................... 132 The Importance of Being Modest ...................................................... 136 v The Anglophonic Turn to Women’s Life Writing ............................. 143 Yang Buwei: The Moderate “Feminist” Revolutionary .................... 148 Literary Modesty: On Humour, Simple Chinese, and Basic English 160 Developing a Sense of Youmo: Levity in the Shadow of Red China. 167 Figural Modesty: On Metonymic Allegories ..................................... 178 Allegories of Life Writing ................................................................. 186 Chapter Three Time of One’s Own: Ling Shuhua Beside/s Modernist Temporalities ... 197 No Sex Please We’re Chinese: On Valuations of Modernity ............ 209 Sexual and Textual Inhibitions .......................................................... 219 The Modern Woman Scholar and Her Need for Privacy ................... 228 Finding Time of One’s Own .............................................................. 234 A Temporality of Her Own ................................................................ 243 Chapter Four Eileen Chang: Modernist or Realist? ......................................................... 251 On or About 2007 .............................................................................. 259 Theorising Allochronism ................................................................... 265 Cold War Realism: The Novel in an Age of Epistemic Uncertainty . 281 Modernist Collage, Cinematic Montage, and Anti-Socialist Realism ............................................................................................................ 287 From History-as-Cinema to Cinema’s History .................................. 298 Reassessing Eileen Chang: Allochronic Realist ................................ 303 vi Conclusion Anglophone Chinese Writing as World Literature .................................. 315 A Worldly Network ........................................................................... 319 A Demotic Model of World Literature .............................................. 324 Women in World Literature ............................................................... 328 Gender and Time...............................................................................