Literature

posts related to modern and contemporary Chinese Literature

Book of Wreckage wins Taiwan Literature Award

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Source: Taipei Times (11/4/23)
‘Book of Wreckage’ wins top prize
PAINFUL MEMORIES: This year’s TLA winner was chosen for its depiction of the White Terror era. It was also the first time New Bud recipients won Golden Book Awards
By Staff Writer, with CNA

The National Museum of Taiwan Literature on Monday announced the winners of the Taiwan Literature Awards (TLA) for Books, with the top prize going to The Book of Wreckage (殘骸書) by Chen Lieh (陳列).

Taiwan Literature Awards for Books prize winner Chen Lieh, author of The Book of Wreckage, is pictured in an undated photograph. Photo courtesy of Ink Publishing

Chen’s work of prose won the 2023 TLA Annual Golden Grand Laurel Award along with NT$1 million (US$30,957) in prize money after it sailed past 190 other submissions, the annual award’s organizing museum said in a statement.

Chen subtly and deftly depicted the suffering and humiliation that has stayed mostly buried while invoking memories and reflection of the White Terror era, using “plain and complex language to revisit history and his personal experiences,” the statement said.

Chen was sentenced to prison in 1972 for political crimes and spent four years and eight months behind bars.

The book won support from the majority of the judges, who touted Chen’s work as “not only bearing witness to an era, but also set to stun readers from future generations.”

Seven other works were awarded the TLA Golden Book Award, including Bullets are the Remaining Life (子彈是餘生) by Tsao Sheng-hao (曹盛濠, or his pen name, “寺偉哲也”), The Lost River (沒口之河) by Huang Han-yau (黃瀚嶢), and Late Night Patrol of the Abandoned God (夜觀巡場 Ia-kuan Sun-tiunn) by Tiunn Ka-siong (張嘉祥).

The other winners of the Golden Book Award were Brother (弟弟) by Chan Wai-yee (陳偉儀, or her pen name, “陳慧”), Here’s to Us, Bottoms Up (我隨意,你盡量) by Ong Chiau-hoa (王昭華), Mooyi (魔以) by Chen Shu-yao (陳淑瑤) and Eyelids of Morning (鱷眼晨曦) by Zhang Guixing (張貴興). Continue reading →

Urban Scenes

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New Publication
Urban Scenes, by Liu Na’ou; translated and introduced by Yaohua Shi and Judith M. Armory
Cambria Press, 2023

More than eighty years after his death, Liu Na’ou (1905—1940) remains a fascinating figure. Liu was born in Taiwan, but early on he wrote that his future lay in Shanghai and did indeed spend the entirety of his glittering but all-too-brief career in his adopted city, working closely with a small coterie of like-minded friends and associates as an editor, writer, film critic, scenarist, and director. Liu introduced Japanese Shinkankakuha (New Sensationism) to China and made it an important school of modern Chinese urban fiction. Urban Scenes, his slim volume of modernist fiction, in particular, has had an outsized influence on Shanghai’s image as a phantasmagoric metropolis in the 1920s and 1930s. This collection is especially valuable since there are no more works from Liu because shortly after producing this he was murdered purportedly for political reasons.

Like Japanese New Sensationists, who zeroed in on sensory responses to the new technologies rapidly transforming Tokyo after the Great Earthquake of 1923, Liu was fixated on the sights, sounds, and smells of Shanghai, that other throbbing metropolis of the Far East, and these came through in his writings. Liu’s urban romances depict, as he himself put it, the “thrill” and “carnal intoxication” of modern urban life. His stories take place in Shanghai’s nightclubs, race tracks, cinemas, and cafes—sites of moral depredation but also of erotic allure and excitement; therein lies the contradictory nature of his urban fiction, which gives us a vivid picture of early twentieth-century Shanghai.

This complete translation of Liu’s seminal work is available for the first time to researchers, students, and general readers interested in modern Chinese literature and culture. In addition to the eight stories in the original Urban Scenes, this collection includes an introduction by the translators and three additional pieces Liu published separately. The translations are based on the first editions of the Chinese texts. Urban Scenes is a valuable addition to collections in Chinese and Sinophone studies.

China’s Online Literature talk

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Online Talk: China’s Online Literature and the Problem of Preservation
Dr. Michel Hockx
Thursday, November 16, 2023
6:00-7:30p.m. CST
Virtual event held on Zoom.

Please register to attend:

https://kansas.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqfuqqrz4uH9YY5V5uoODOT6PN3sSzv6O2

Abstract

Since their introduction in the late 1990s, websites devoted to the production and discussion of literary work have been ubiquitous on the Chinese Web. Over the years, the study of online literature has become an established field of inquiry within the Chinese academy. General studies and textbooks have been produced, and especially for the first decade or so of online literary production, there appears to be consensus on what were the most important sites, authors, and works. This emerging canon of born-digital works, however, can rarely still be found online in its original location and context. This paper addresses the challenges of preserving early Chinese Internet literature, as well as the opportunities for literary analysis when preservation does take place.

About the speaker

Dr. Michel Hockx is professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely, both in English and in Chinese, on topics related to modern Chinese literary culture, especially early 20th-century Chinese magazine literature and print culture and contemporary Internet literature. His monograph Internet Literature in China was listed by Choice magazine as one of the “Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015.”

Posted by: Faye Xiao <hxiao@ku.edu>

HK Lit and the Taiwanese Encounter

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New Publication
Jessica Siu-yin Yeung, “Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature and Shih Shu-Ching’s Hong Kong Stories.” Cultural History 12/2 (Open Access)

Abstract

This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei’s case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.

Posted by: Jessica Siu-yin Yeung <jessicayeung@LN.edu.hk>

The ‘Rhythm’ of Revolution talk

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The “Rhythm” of Revolution: Body Politics and the Voice in the Leftist Poetry Recitation

Join the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies for a lecture featuring Ling Kang, Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University.

Wednesday, October 25th at 7 pm US Central Time via Zoom. Here is the registration link:

https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_k9eNx_L3R76SB8xG7YcVjA

LECTURE ABSTRACT:

In 1932, a group of leftist poets in Shanghai established the China Poetry Society, aiming to produce poetry that would enlighten and mobilize the masses to be the self-conscious political subject. This talk revisits the poetic works and theories of the members of the Society, focusing in particular on the extensive discussion on the historical origin and political relevance of poetic rhythm and its relationship with labor. Tracking the transnational circulation and transformation of the new knowledge of bodily rhythm and poetic rhythm since the late 19th century, this talk shows how a new conception of poetic rhythm as a mediating and mobilizing device gave rise to a series of leftist poetic experiments that attempted to construct the collective political subject through invoking the bodily solidarity of the laboring masses.

Posted by: Connie Yip cyip@uchicago.edu

The Narrow Cage review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Roy Chan’s review of The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales, by Vasily Eroshenko and translated by Adam Kuplowsky. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/roy-chan-3/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales

By Vasily Eroshenko
Translated by Adam Kuplowsky

Reviewed by Roy Chan
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2023)

Vasily Eroshenko. The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales Tr. Adam Kuplowsky. Forward by Jack Zipes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. xlvii + 252 pp. Paperback ($24.99). ISBN-13 9780231557085

It might seem an odd proposition to suggest that solutions to the predicaments of colonial domination, racial injustice, capitalist exploitation, and in general all the myriad forms of human inequity may be found in a set of fairy tales. But this was exactly the ambitious project of Vasily Eroshenko (1890–1952), a writer who became, however briefly, a prominent figure in modern Japanese, Chinese, and world letters. He encapsulated a set of intriguing antinomies: blinded at the age of four, he went on to become an intrepid world traveler, leading a peripatetic life through England, India, Japan, and China. A subject of the Russian empire who was born within a Ukrainian cultural milieu near the border of present-day Ukraine, he primarily composed his stories in Japanese and Esperanto. While committed to the values of a universal humanism, he demonstrated time and again that humans were also the primary architects of unfreedom across race, class, gender, and species. His children’s fables are records of both innocence and cruelty, sketches of the possibility of universal love suffused with tearful melancholia.

That Eroshenko featured most prominently in Japanese and Chinese modern letters rather than that of his homeland (however it is defined between Russia, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union) should serve as a reminder to how pivotal and productive these transnational engagements were in the intertwined development of both national literatures. As translator Adam Kuplowsky notes in his comprehensive and compelling introduction, it is difficult to ascertain the exact process by which Eroshenko composed his stories, and even to pinpoint in which language his stories were originally composed. Eroshenko existed for the Chinese reading public in translation (performed primarily by his champion Lu Xun), and yet the conventional model of translation in proposing a relation between source and target becomes blurry. Eroshenko’s patently exophonous approach to literary composition epitomizes the very project of universalist, international emancipation that he was deeply committed to; in our post-Cold War aversion to grand narratives of emancipation, universality, and humanism, Eroshenko’s wistful and even utterly utopian aspirations may sound odd to our cynical ears. Even childish. Continue reading →

Xi Jinping Thought on Culture (1)

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Excellent piece, excellent analysis.

Where are all the China anthropologists, who should all be dissecting this?

By the way, I wonder if Xi’s wrongheaded and dangerous idea that culture is somehow “genetic”, located in the “DNA” of “his” people, is part of this current repackaging effort, in some way. Mr. Xi has pronounced on “cultural DNA” recently, and I made a note of it in an article on the uses and misuses of aDNA (DNA from ancient remains), which I believe will come out soon. The rapidly growing field of aDNA studies is highly interesting but also plagued by all sorts of misunderstandings. In Mr Xi’s case it seems both ethnocentric and ultranationalist: his pronouncements suggest that he sees his nation as a living organism, which of course it never was and never could be — except in somebody’s propaganda fantasy.

Magnus FIskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Xi Jinping Thought on Culture

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Source: China Media Project (10/13/23)
Xi Jinping’s Cathedral of Pretense
With the addition of a grandiose new buzzword in China for culture and civilization, it may seem that a towering future is on the horizon. We take a hard look at the foundations of “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture.”
By David Bandurski

With all the talk in recent months in China of “new civilizational splendor” (文明新辉煌) in everything from sports to Marxism, heritage protection to village life, it is impossible not to sit up and take notice of the country’s fulsome messaging on culture. Surely, something must be happening. No? As officials emerged last weekend from the latest Chinese Communist Party work conference, the language mounted further. They unveiled yet another eponymous phrase for the country’s top leader: Xi Jinping Thought on Culture (习近平文化思想).

In the Party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper, a front-page tribute on Wednesday deemed the phrase a “significant milestone” (里程碑意义), suggesting excitedly that the general secretary had “accurately grasped the trend of mutual ideological and cultural agitation worldwide.” What does all of this nonsense mean? Why is China building the rhetoric over culture and civilization to such dizzying heights?

If we avoid becoming distracted by the monumentality of the cathedral of language before us, and gaze past its gothic flourishes, the answer is deceptively simple. Xi Jinping’s obsession with culture is about the need to disguise basic questions of power and legitimacy behind the elaborate stonework of political discourse.

Grab your chisels. Let’s break this down.

The Nine Adheres

According to explications of “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” provided this week by the People’s Daily and other official media, Xi’s brand-new cultural concept is actually the culmination of a “series of important speeches” he delivered around two previous meetings on propaganda and ideology. Continue reading →

Teahouse

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Claire Conceison’s translation of Teahouse, Meng Jinghui’s radical adaptation of Lao She’s famous drama. The translation includes images from Meng’s 2019 production of the play in Avignon. A teaser appears below; for the full translation, see: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/teahouse/. The translation is published in conjunction with Barbara Leonesi’s recent MCLC essay on Meng’s adaptation, a link to which appears in the title header.

My thanks to Claire Conceison for sharing her translation with the MCLC commmunity.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Teahouse 茶馆

By Lao She 老舍[1]
Adapted by Meng Jinghui 孟京辉[2]
Translated by Claire Conceison 康开丽
Published in conjunction with Barbara Leonesi’s MCLC essay on Meng’s adaptation
See also Conceison’s 2019 report on Meng’s Avignon production

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October 2023)

Preshow at performance of Meng’s Teahouse performed at the Avignon Festival 2019 from July 9-20 at L’Opera Confluence theater. All subsequent photos are from this performance. Photo: Claire Conceison.

Dramatis Personae (in order of speaking)[3]

Teahouse Customers
Wang Lifa
Master Song
Master Chang
Er Dezi
Master Ma
Pockmark Liu
Kang Liu
Kang Shunzi
Eunuch Pang
Qin Zhongyi
Tang the Oracle
Little Girl
Peasant Woman
Li San
Song Enzi
Tubby Huang		 Little Spider
Critic
Officer
Publisher
Big Spider
Sophie
Ugly
Ronald McDonald
Biggie
Daxi
Xiaoming
Didi
Bao’er
Dafei
Little Thing
Big Sister
Little Sister		 Wang Shufen
Refugee
Policeman
Weishen
Chen
Lin
Qin Boren
The Actor
Ding Bao

Teahouse set, designed by Zhang Wu. Composed of 6 tons of steel, it required assembly of 1,000 pieces by 45 technicians, and 8 electricians to rotate the sphere. Photo: Meng Jinghui Studio.

SCENE 1: Ensemble

First Customer: Who is this Tan Sitong?

Second Customer: I heard of him somewhere before. He must have committed a horrible crime. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been sentenced to death.

Third Customer: In the past few months, some officials and scholars have been trying to stir up trouble and causing all kinds of chaos!

Fourth Customer: No matter what happens, my Bannerman’s subsidy is safe. That Tan Sitong and Kang Youwei were saying subsidies should be abolished and we should earn our own living. That’s wicked!

Third Customer: By the time we get our subsidies, our superiors have skimmed most of it off the top anyway. It’s a tough life however you look at it.

Fourth Customer: A tough life is better than no life. If I had to earn my own living, I would starve.

Wang Lifa: Customers! Do Not Discuss Affairs of State.

Master Song and Master Chang: Drink some of this? ….. [read the full translation here]

Chinese Revolution in Practice

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New Publication
Chinese Revolution in Practice: From Movement to the State, by Guo Wu
Routledge, 2023

Description:

This book employs multiple case studies to explore how the Chinese communist revolution began as an ideology-oriented intellectual movement aimed at improving society before China’s transformation into a state that suppresses dissenting voices by outsourcing its power of coercion and incarceration.

The author examines the movement’s methods of early self-organization, grass-roots level engagement, creation of new modes of expression and popular art forms, manipulation of collective memory, and invention of innovative ways of mass incarceration. Covering developments from 1920 to 1970, the book considers a wide range of Chinese individuals and groups, from early Marxists to political prisoners in the PRC, to illustrate a dynamic, interactive process in which the state and individuals contend with each other. It argues that revolutionary practices in modern China have created a regime that can be conceptualized as an “ideology-military-propaganda” state that prompts further reflection on the relationships between revolution and the state, the state and collective articulation and memory, and the state and reflective individuals in a global context.

Illustrating the continuity of the Chinese revolution and past decades’ socialist practices and mechanisms, this study is an ideal resource for scholars of Chinese history, politics, and twentieth-century revolutions. Continue reading →

Gu Junzheng chapter–cfp

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CFP: 顾均正 (Gu Junzheng)’s Story “Xing Bian” [“Sex Change”] (1940 Kexue Quwei)

Chinese scholars are invited to write a chapter on a story by 顾均正 (Gu Junzheng) called “Xing Bian” [“Sex Change”] (1940 Kexue Quwei) as an example of Chinese science fiction that deals with transgender themes. The chapter will appear in The Handbook of Transgender Science Fiction. We also welcome chapters on other examples of Chinese, or more broadly Asian, science literature or film that explores transgender issues. Due date is 20 October. For more details, see the CFP at:

https://bit.ly/TransgenderScienceFictionCFP

Douglas Vakoch <dvakoch@ciis.edu>

Long prison sentence for Yalqun Rozi

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Source: The China Project (10/5/23)
Long prison sentence for book-loving Uyghur who tried to preserve history, culture for kids
In January 2018, China sentenced writer, critic, and educator Yalqun Rozi to 15 years in prison for “splittism” and “extremist ideas.”
By Ruth Ingram

Writer Yalqun Rozi was interrogated in China (left) for working on Uyghur-language children’s textbooks that included ideas the Chinese Communist Party called “splittist.” In 2018, a court found him guilty and imprisoned Rozi for 15 years. The image at right is from his son Kamalturk Yalqun’s YouTube testimony refuting a state-run propaganda video against his father.

Seven years ago, in October 2016, the prolific Uyghur writer and literary critic Yalqun Rozi disappeared from his home in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China, an area three times the size of France.

When Rozi resurfaced in January 2018, it was in a Chinese court in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, where a judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison for trying to “split” the country and spread “extremist ideas” among schoolchildren.

All this happened while Rozi’s wife and children were in the United States waiting for him to join the family for a road trip through America before returning home. His son and daughter, Kamaltürk, 33, and Tumaris Yalqun, 27, had studied in the U.S. for a few years and his wife, Zaynap Ablajan, was there on a tourist visa. Continue reading →

CLT2 54.1-2

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Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce that Chinese Literature and Thought Today (CLTT) v54 n1&2 (2023) has been published and we are running a free access period of this issue during the next four weeks. All contents of the issue can be viewed and downloaded on the Taylor & Francis website during this period:

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/mcsp21/54/1-2?nav=tocList

In this double issue of CLTT, we celebrate the works of the 2023 Newman laureate Chang Kuei-hisng 張貴興. In addition, we remember the great Chinese philosopher Li Zehou 李澤厚 and the 2019 Newman laureate Xi Xi 西西.

Please take advantage of the free access period to check out our brand new contents!

Ping Zhu
Editor in Chief

Wang Wen-hsing dies at 84

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Source: Focus Taiwan (10/3/23)
Taiwanese novelist Wang Wen-hsing dies at 84
By Chiu Tzu-yin and Matthew Mazzetta

Former National Taiwan University president Lee Si-chen (李嗣涔, left) awarded Taiwanese writer Wang Wen-hsing a certificate of honorary doctorate during a ceremony at the university in 2007. CNA file photo

Former National Taiwan University president Lee Si-chen (李嗣涔, left) awarded Taiwanese writer Wang Wen-hsing a certificate of honorary doctorate during a ceremony at the university in 2007. CNA file photo

Taipei, Oct. 3 (CNA) Taiwanese writer Wang Wen-hsing (王文興), best known for his 1973 novel “Family Catastrophe,” has died at the age of 84.

Wang’s death, from natural causes on Sept. 27, was announced by National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Department of Foreign Languages on Oct. 2, and confirmed to CNA by his wife, Chen Chu-yun (陳竺筠).

According to the Ministry of Culture, Wang was born in Fuzhou City in China’s Fujian Province in 1939, and came to Taiwan with his family in 1946, settling first in Donggang in Pingtung County and then in Taipei two years later.

He studied at NTU in its Department of Foreign Languages, where he was part of a group of talented young writers including Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇), Ouyang Tzu (歐陽子) and Chen Ruo-xi (陳若曦) who founded the magazine “Modern Literature” (現代文學). Continue reading →