Organizer: Vivienne Shue, Cornell University
Chair: Kirk A. Denton, Ohio State University
"Social Fiction" in the Late Qing: 1900-1910
Jeffrey M. Loree, University of California, Los Angeles
Reformist fiction of the type Liang Qichao advocated at the turn of the century has been characterized by many (including Liang himself) as having failed. Yet, upon re-examining the literary history of the period, one cannot help but be struck by its achievements. This discussion will focus upon the most well known of the many late Qing fiction genres, the shehui xiaoshuo (social novel).
Perhaps the most influential characterization of shehui xiaoshuo to date is the brief postmortem by Lu Xun in the concluding chapter of his Brief History of Chinese Fiction (1923). Dispensing with the generic classification used by those who wrote and published shehui xiaoshuo, he called them qianze xiaoshuo, (castigatory fiction) and disparaged their "marked poverty in technique."
There is much more to these texts than "castigation," and the "technique" they display is crucial to our understanding of representations of Chinese "society," (indeed shehui was a locution that had only started to gain currency at the turn of the century). It will be shown that the underpinnings of the shehui xiaoshuo must be located within both Chinese and foreign literary texts, and far from having failed, the vision of society as constructed in the shehui xiaoshuo provides important insights about the direction that Chinese fiction would take in the decades that followed.
Between Facts and Fiction: The 1905 Anti-American Boycott Through Novels
Guanhua Wang, University of Connecticut
The late-Qing political novels have attracted little scholarly attention because of their presumed lack of literary value. This neglect is unfortunate because these novels were probably not meant to be pure literature as we think they should have been. Instead, they are mixtures of a variety of modes of writings ranging from unofficial history, news reports and political essays to fiction. As such they contain valuable information on aspects of the era and on the subjects that they treat. This paper illustrates the point by analyzing eight novels which were inspired by a mass movement-the 1905 anti-American boycott. More specifically, this paper argues that political novels created an intermediary realm in a changing political culture which situated between politics as mass participation activities and politics as spectacle public affairs.
The Merging of the Classical Language with the Vernacular in the Short Stories of
the Early Republic
Xu Xueqing, University of Toronto
The strong impact of Western literature on China and its interaction with tradition during the early years of the Republic resulted in a blooming of fiction including short stories in both Classical language and the vernacular. There had been two basic types of short stories in China in the past: the chuanqi and biji tales written in Classical, and the very different huaben stories in the vernacular. Both forms were revived during the 1910s in a remarkable transformation in which language played a major part. By comparing stories in Classical and one in vernacular by two leading writers of the period, Bao Tianxiao and Zhou Shoujuan, my paper will seek to show how those in Classical language developed in new ways the narrative features of the huaben stories, while their vernacular stories elaborate the heritage from traditional chuanqi tales. This impressive transformation of the two basic kinds of traditional short stories into new forms could only be achieved by a mingling of the two Chinese language forms.
These remarkable literary experiments and innovations came to an abrupt halt when the modern vernacular movement of May Fourth proclaimed the death of the Classical language and promoted its total replacement by the vernacular. My paper will argue that the Classical language in the adapted form found in the writings of Bao, Zhou, and their contemporaries was not "dead." On the contrary, it was undergoing a very active and innovative state in the development of the Chinese literary language.
Talking Poetry: Articulating the Essential Nation in Theories of May Fourth
Vernacular Verse
John A. Crespi, University of Chicago
Rather than viewing May Fourth era baihua poetry as merely a spin-off from the New Culture movement, the invention of Chinese "new poetry" should be closely reconsidered as part of an attempt on the part of Hu Shi and other members of the Chinese modernizing literati to construct for themselves a discursive position as authoritative spokesmen for a belatedly modernizing nation. By using the term "articulate" in two senses-(1) to connect one thing to another; and (2) to express in speech-I demonstrate how these intellectuals constructed an ideology of poetic representation that by syncretizing evolutionism, literary realism, Romantic nationalism, vernacular reform, the Anglo-American new poetry movement, folklore studies, and Chinese literary history and poetics, objectified a "will" of the Chinese nation/people to which these intellectuals claimed access through a presumably pure "voice" of vernacular poetry. Understood thus in terms of political rather than strictly literary representation, the new poetry movement stands as an instance of how, based on a typically anti-colonial reification of national popular culture, Chinese modernizing intellectuals' institution of new poetry concealed the reality of ideological mystification with a fantasy of social liberation.
Disciplining Masculinity in Literary Historiography: Yu Dafu and Guo Muoro
Jing Tsu, University of California, Berkeley
Both Yu Dafu and Guo Muoro are often dismissed today in mainland criticism as narcissistic male writers, banished to the self-indulgent realms of their fictional writings. Aesthetically valued for his decadence and romanticism, Yu Dafu appears to have been and still is celebrated as a prototypical male subject born of this historical period, one who may be decadent in appearance but pure at heart, one who may have expressed extreme sexual frustration only to give way to the larger national cause at hand. I argue, however, instead of facilely recuperated under a paternalistic understanding which allows for his "decadence" only to normalize it as a mere display, Yu Dafu's and Guo Muoro's works challenge and in fact endanger the male subject, patriotic and self-possessed. This overdetermination of "masculinity," I argue, harbors within itself a profoundly gendered critical practice, one which rejects the questioning of masculinity as a social category as much distanced from "patriarchy" as femininity. The conflation of "masculinity" with male ideology, I further argue, displaces the individual male subject with the abstraction of an all-encompassing notion of dominating masculinity. I will examine how Yu Dafu's Lost Lamb (1930) and Guo Muoro's Miss Germeiluo (1924), in dialogue with their other works and the criticism they have received, demonstrate the uncertainty of male subjectivity, a subjectivity which quivers on the brink of losing control and blushes at its poignantly felt lack. Then I will use this as a way of understanding the gendered practice of literary historiography and its stakes in maintaining "masculinity."