Rethinking modern Chinese literature in a global context

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 1-9

  Ning, Wang ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949241560     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-2007-021     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. One exception is David Damrosch's insightful book What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), which touches on modern Chinese literature in translation.
2. On modern Chinese literature as the whole see Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
3. E.g., Gayatri Spivak has taken courses in Chinese at Columbia University since 2002 and even spoke some Chinese at the ceremony marking her honorary appointment as guest professor of Tsinghua University on March 7, 2006, and J. Hillis Miller declared in a lecture at the same university on September 5, 2003, that "if I were twenty years younger, I would start from the very beginning to study Chinese."
4. On the development of contemporary Chinese literature under the Western influence see Wang Ning, "Confronting Western Influence: Rethinking Chinese Literature of the New Period," New Literary History 24 (1993): 905-26.
5. On the formation of the modern Chinese literary tradition see Modern Chinese Literary Tradition (Zhongguo xiandai wenxue chuantong), ed. Center for Modern Chinese Literature Studies, Nanjing University (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 2002).
6. See Wang Ning, "Translation as Cultural '(De)colonization,'" Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 10, no. 4 (2002): 283-92.
7. Freudianism had a tremendous influence on twentieth-century Chinese literature; conversely, different versions of Freudianism emerged from the Chinese context. For detailed discussion and analysis see my article "The Reception of Freudianism in Modern Chinese Literature," pt. 1, China Information 5, no. 4 (1990): 58-71;
8. pt. 2, China Information 6, no. 1 (1991): 45-54.
9. Lu Xun frankly admits that "when I began to write stories, I did not realize that I had a talent for writing fiction. For at the time I was staying in the guesthouse in Beijing, where I could not write research papers, as I had no reference works; nor could I do translation, as I did not have even the original texts at hand. In this situation, what I could do was to write something like fiction. Hence The Diary of the Mad Man came out. When I wrote this piece, I depended only on some hundred foreign novels or stories I had read and some knowledge of medicine I had obtained. As for other preparations, there were none" ("How I Started to Write Fiction," in Collected Works of Lu Xun ["Wo zenme zuo qi xiaoshuo lai," in Lu Xun quanji], vol. 4 [Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 1989], 512).
10. The novelist Yu Hua even more frankly declares that "when writers of our generation started to write, what influenced us most was translated novels. Classical Chinese novels influenced us much less, let alone modern [Chinese] novels. I always think that the construction and development of a new Chinese language owe the greatest debt to those translators, who have found a middle way between Chinese and foreign languages: they have expressed in Chinese the spirit of foreign literature, but they have also enriched Chinese itself" (Yu Hua and Pan Kaixiong, "A Dialogue on New Year's Day," Writers ["Xinnian diyitian de duihua," Zuojia], no. 3 [1996]: 6).
11. On this periodization of modern Chinese literature see my article "Globalizing Chinese Literature: Moving toward a Rewriting of Contemporary Chinese Literary Culture," Journal of Contemporary China 13, no. 38 (2004): 53-68.
12. See Jie Lu, Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2005).
13. David Der-wei Wang, "Afterword: Chinese Fiction for the Nineties," in Running Wild: New Chinese Writers, ed. David Der-wei Wang with Jeanne Tai (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 254.
14. Zhang Yiwu, an influential avant-garde critic in China, has advanced a new concept, "new century literature" (xin shiji wenxue), to describe the development of Chinese literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
15. See his article "The End of 'New Literature' and the Start of New Century Literature," Frontiers of Literary Theory ("'Xinwenxue' de zhongjie yu xin shiji wenxue," Wenxue lilun qianyan) 3 (2006): 241-73.