Organizer: Deirdre Sabina Knight, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Jon Eugene von Kowallis, University of Melbourne
Discussant: Leo Ou-fan Lee, Harvard University
This panel examines changing narratives of modernity in twentieth-century China. To account for the complexity of the question, the diversity of accounts and the strategies behind them, papers will consider alternative narratives in a variety of literary genres and public discourse.
With the advent of debates about postmodernity, globalization and late-stage capitalism, it remains for scholars to clarify what is meant by modernity. To what extent is modernity a cultural construct? What kind of tropes signify China's quest for modernity? What lies behind a commitment to modernity? How do conceptions of modernity relate to resistance in everyday life?
Jon Kowallis's provocative idea of an alternative modernity posed by late-Qing classical verse explores the relationship between this poetry and Western definitions of literary modernity. Chen Jianhua draws attention to print culture by examining a popular 1920s Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies magazine and how its piecemeal reform differed from the more radical reform of the May Fourth movement. Drawing on her larger study of women's cultural practices in occupied Shanghai, Nicole Huang looks at how sophisticated formal experiments with the essay advanced women's struggle to legitimate their role as writers and their vision of urban modernity. Sabina Knight analyzes the role of narrative structures in contesting fatalistic paradigms so as to further the emancipatory goals of modernity. Finally, Sheldon Lu outlines four discourses underlying China's search for a modernity of its own definition.
Prostitute, Procuress or Protectress of the Nation? Fan Zengxiang's Caiyun qu and
the Popular Legend of Sai Jinhua
Jon Eugene von Kowallis, University of Melbourne
On hearing the name of the real-life courtesan Sai Jinhua, most readers immediately think of the 1905 novel Neihai hua (A Flower in the Sea of Sin), conceived by Jin Tianyu (1874-1947) but finished by Zeng Pu (1872-1935), a sophisticated roman-a-clef which presents Sai Jinhua in a less-than-favorable light. But the earliest treatment of Sai Jinhua came not in vernacular fiction, but in the long heptasyllabic ancient-style poem, the Caiyun qu (Song/ballad of Rainbow Cloud) by the Hubei literatus and jinshi Fan Zengxiang (1846-1931) written entirely in the classical language. Although Fan was a whole generation older than Zeng Pu and is considered a "poet of the old school" (jiu pai shiren), his classical-style verse depiction of Sai is clearly more than one-dimensional. What are the literary characteristics by which we have defined the concept of "modernity" for the purposes of Western literary history and how have these been applied, ignored, or applied only selectively in the case of China? What specific features do the late-Qing "poets of the old schools" share with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and other harbingers of modernism in the West and in what ways can the Chinese poets be said to have been their actual contemporaries? This paper seeks answers to these and other questions with specific focus on the necessity for the creation of the literary figure of Sai Jinhua and an alternative modernity posed by classical verse in the late Qing and early Republican eras.
Refiguration of Literary Modernity: Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Magazine Banyue
and Urban Shanghai in the Early 1920s
Jianhua Chen, Harvard University
Focusing on Banyue (Semi-Monthly), the best-selling Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies magazine in Shanghai during 1921 and 1924, this paper explores an alternative type of time consciousness and literary novelty, one in contrast to the acknowledged May Fourth literary modernity primarily devoted to a utopian society and a scheme of reconceptualization of progressive ideas. Banyue not only contains literary texts in both baihua and wenyan which historically expanded generic and perceptive territories in juxtaposition to the development of urban space, but also shows the editor Zhou Shoujuan's unique approach to print culture. Of various devices Zhou designed to attract urban consumers, the front cover of fashionable women was most appealing. Made by advanced print technology, this icon embodies some characteristic features of the magazine-the ideology of the bourgeois nuclear family, erotic discourse and an aesthetics of intimacy.
By critically scrutinizing the special issues on love, divorce, the family, prostitution, and children, this paper will reevaluate the Butterfly writers' social and intellectual role. Different from the May Fourth radicals whose world view was based on a conception of social change in toto, they approached modernity in the spirit of secularization and calculation, incorporating immediate changes brought on by technology and urbanization while simultaneously seeking piecemeal reform in everyday life. Paradoxically, they both remained faithful to a culture they inherited and actively engaged in the modern world.
Voices, Identities, and Self-Promotion: Literary Modernity in Women's Essay
Writing of 1940s Shanghai
Nicole Huang, University of California, Berkeley
During the 1940s in the Japanese-occupied city of Shanghai, women writers adopted the essay genre and transformed it into a powerful literary form to redefine the boundaries between life and work, to formulate the material basis of the notion of femininity, and to devise everyday survival strategies for women both inside and outside the household. The essay genre was an important discursive site where women writers overtly challenged literary conventions, searched for alternatives in both literary writing and practices of everyday life, and promoted themselves as important cultural figures. Women's essay writing in 1940s Shanghai helped construct a vision of urban modernity which centered around women, derived mainly from the experiences of women, and concentrated on the realm of the domestic.
This paper presents a study of the essays written by women writers in 1940s Shanghai, particularly those by Eileen Chang, Su Qing, and Guan Lu. The essay genre was reinvented as a hybrid form of literary writing, representing the growing interaction between literature and other cultural genres. Free flowing sequences of random thoughts and shifts between different personae were among the fictional, theatrical, and cinematic devices appropriated by women writers to further expand the representative capacities of the modern essay. This cultural intervention by Shanghai women persevered in the midst of the intricate political strictures and the social/economic confinements that resulted from the war-time occupation.
The Unredeemed Half of Modernity: Where is Human Agency in 20th-Century Chinese
Literature?
Deirdre Sabina Knight, University of Wisconsin, Madison
While greater attention to subjective introspection marks much twentieth-century Chinese fiction, this paper holds that the way individual consciousness is drawn often only consolidates the absence of agency and reaffirms the power of fate or circumstance.
This assertion depends on a distinction between two key aspects of modernity and the Enlightenment: (1) subjectivity, or the realm of consciousness including critical reason, and (2) agency, or acting on the world outside consciousness. Modernity may mean a rise of individual consciousness, yet equally crucial to the modern age is the possibility that reason can advance human freedom. Perhaps Chinese literature has moved on to postmodernism, an anti-Enlightenment movement, without fully realizing the optimistic and constructive spirit of modernity.
Yet can authors or critics underscore human agency and remain sensitive to the enormity of historical events and constraints facing the people of China? This question leads me to discuss how narrative structures can either reinforce or contest deterministic paradigms. In order to reject historical inevitability and recognize the legitimacy of reflecting on alternative possibilities, Gary Saul Morson has introduced the concept of sideshadowing to name "both an open sense of temporality and a set of devices used to convey that sense." I will make a case for the aptness of sideshadowing as an interpretive device for the study of Chinese literature, especially the works of Mo Yan and Su Tong.
Mapping the Discourse of Modernity in Contemporary China
Sheldon H. Lu, University of Pittsburgh
My paper attempts to trace China's search for a modernity of its own as an alternative to the Enlightenment Euro-American paradigm. The quest for an alternative Chinese or Asian modernity has led to various responses to the dominant Euro-American model: from acceptance, adaptation, appropriation, application, to revision, resistance and rejection. It entails a critique of capitalism and Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, development and modernization.
First, I will give a brief overview of China's reaction to the advent of Western modernity since the Opium War in the mid-19th century. But I will focus on the contemporary period, the age of "global capitalism" after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. I will address four types of discourse concerning Chinese modernity: (1) the official, state discourse of modernity and modernization, "socialist market economy" and "socialism with Chinese characteristics"; (2) the inter-China discourse of modernity: "Asian modernity," "industrial East Asia," "Confucian capitalism," "post-Confucianism"; (3) the humanist critique of modernity in Chinese intellectual circles, among thinkers/critics such as Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu; and (4) the advent of the discourse of postmodernity/postmodernism in China.
I will ask whether the discourse of Chinese/Asian modernity constitutes a counter-hegemonic formation vis-à-vis the European model, or whether it extends the logic of European modernity and capitalism. I pay attention to Chinese reflections on the dialectic of modernity, both its emancipatory and exploitative dimensions, as it relates to the rebuilding of China.