21st-Century Chinese Literature and the Other Arts
A Forum Session at the 2018 MLA in Chicago, January 3-6, 2019
This panel will explore the relationship between literature and the other arts in China since around 2000. Mindful of China’s cultural heritage of inter-arts expression, particularly in the realms of poetry, visual art and calligraphy, we invite papers which explore echoes of those traditions in recent decades. These certainly can be visual art related, but can also address film, music or other forms of expression which intersect meaningfully with literature. In somewhat broader context, visual art and literature enjoyed a resurgence of interactivity in various avant-garde moments of the 1970s and 80s, where Stars, Misty, and Today movements among others, took leadership in opening new pathways in China’s cultural landscape. In those heady days of largely self-taught, cutting edge creative expression, the choices of specific expressive media were secondary to an ecology of “new wave” expression that involved writers and creative artists of all media in common purpose of exploration and innovation. Since the 1990s and particularly after 2000, though, a relative hardening of media categories has occurred in large part due to intense commodification of largely visual art cultural products, making for significant wealth gap segregating those who create paintings, for instance, from poets and other writers. Nonetheless, important instances of media intersection do still frequently occur, and in some respects are all the more significant due to broader configuration of value in China’s cultural marketplace.
Please send title/abstract proposals as well as a 300-word maximum biography in MS Word format by email attachment to session organizer Paul Manfredi by March 10, 2018. Presenters must be current members of the MLA.
Paul Manfredi (manfredi@plu.edu)