Chinese Literature Today news

Dear MCLC Friends and Colleagues

Summer greetings from the University of Oklahoma! Over the last year I assumed the Editor-in Chief position of Contemporary Chinese Thought with the understanding that after this year we will be merging CLT with CCT to launch a new title: CLTT, or Chinese Literature and Thought Today with Routledge. The new journal will continue the trajectory of CCT as an interdisciplinary hub for Chinese thought in English translation, but CLTT will expand its breadth to include Chinese literature and poetry, literary criticism, poetics interviews as well. CLTT will maintain many aspects of the award-winning design of CLT’s parent journal, World Literature Today (America’s longest-running world literature journal), so that we can continue in CLT’s tradition of marrying aesthetic attention to detail more typical of a literary trade publication with the rigor of a peer-review journal. We believe that by combining our journals’ individual strengths, we can bring more attention to the scholars and authors we translate and publish.

Below, I am including the latest CLT Editor’s Note, which goes into more detail about the up-coming issue of CLT and more details about CCT’s amazing history and our hopes for the future.  Thank you all so much for your support of both CLT and CCT over the years. It has been a tremendous honor getting to know so many of you and doing our small part to get your scholarship, translations, reviews, poetry, fiction, and more out to readers. So, on behalf of my colleagues Zhu Ping and Julie Shilling, thank you again and we are genuinely looking forward to working with you all to shape the future of Chinese Literature and Thought Today.  A new CFP will soon follow.

Onward!

Jonathan Stalling
Editor in Chief, Chinese Literature Today & Contemporary Chinese Thought

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Chinese Literature Today vol. 10, no. 1
Editor’s Note

This issue celebrates the work of the 2021 winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, Yan Lianke. Often described as the most daring literary voice of his generation, Yan is widely celebrated inside and outside of China. He has even been nominated for the Newman Prize more than any other writer (four times: in 2008, 2014, 2016, and 2021), an accomplishment we are celebrating by publishing all of the previous nomination statements by former jurists Kirk Denton, Jianmei Liu, and Carlos Rojas, as well as the 2021 winning juror, Eric Abrahamsen. Next is Yan’s masterful Newman Prize acceptance speech, “A Village Greater than the World,” in which he describes the village as not only a microcosm of the world, but as a space that paradoxically contains all of humanity’s complexities. Yan’s unforgettable speech was first delivered at an award ceremony at Renmin University in Beijing and later webcast to an international audience in March. CLTis proud to be the first venue to publish it in English translation. Then in an interview conducted by Haiyan Xie, Yan responds to a variety of questions that probe the author’s views on contemporary Chinese society, on the craft and lifestyle of writing Chinese fiction today, on classical and contemporary Chinese literature, and on his willingness to write frankly about life as he has experienced it. Also in this feature section, Carlos Rojas, Yan’s prolific English translator, pens an essay in which he compares Yan’s novel The Day the Sun Died to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lu Xun’s Call to Arms in order to elucidate Yan’s mythorealist literary style vis-à-vis the trope of sleepwalking.

In this issue’s poetry section, readers will encounter new works from US-based Chinese poet-scholar Mai Mang (the pen name of Yibing Huang) as well as six poems by Hong Kong poet Yam Gong (the pen name of Lau Yee-ching 劉以正).

Zhu Wenying is this issue’s featured author. Zhang Hong, editor of the Guangzhou Literature and Art Newspaper, interviews Zhu about the evolution of her writing as well as other topics that include gender, literary form, and her deep resonance with the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai. Then in an earlier self-interview entitled “Ten Years in Eleven Chapters,” Zhu Wenying writes eleven short essays in response to a range of questions that delve into writing as both a craft and way of life, and on the influence that love, music, and aging have had on her writing. Finally, in the short story “Soirée in the Spring,” first published in 2016, Zhu weaves a narrative centered on a young academic’s journey of self-discovery as she navigates a love affair that spans Berlin and Shanghai, time and space, and perception and reality as she seeks to illuminate a life path cast in shadow. The section ends with an essay by the Chinese literary critic Zhang Qinghua, who discusses her unique lyrical style as he explores her fiction through several poetic nodes to illuminate the ways in which Zhu’s work functions as a window into the “Chinese zeitgeist.”

As I mentioned in the last issue’s Editor’s Note, CLT is on the verge of a new and exciting transformation. On behalf of all of us at CLT, I would like to thank you personally for your support over the years. The first five years of our journey were as an independent journal modeled on our older sibling World Literature Today, and jointly edited with our colleagues at Beijing Normal University. Over the subsequent half-decade, we began a lasting partnership with our current publisher, Routledge. Last year we thanked our friends and colleagues at BNU for their past support, vision, and friendship as we began a new period of life as a journal wholly edited by our University of Oklahoma faculty with support from the Harold J. and Ruth Newman Chair of US-China Issues, a position I currently hold as a Co-Director of the Institute for US-China Issues. The institute also oversees the Newman Prizes and the Chinese Literature Translation Archive and Special Collections.

Last year I was given the great honor of following Carine Defoort as the Editor in Chief of the well-established and influential journal Contemporary Chinese Thought, which she helped transition from an earlier iteration known as Chinese Studies in Philosophy. Established in 1969, it was edited for many years by Chung-ying Cheng, a scholar who pioneered the formalization of Chinese philosophy in the United States in the 1960s. From 1993 to 1997 the journal was guest-edited by Michael Schoenhals, who changed the name to Contemporary Chinese Thought. Professor Defoort helped expand it from a purely philosophical journal to one that explored a wider scope of contemporary Chinese intellectual life. Interestingly, in the 1993 inaugural issue of Contemporary Chinese Thought, under Carine’s editorial leadership we find two direct connections to Chinese Literature Today: an article on Chinese novelist Wang Shuo, whose work has been discussed in CLT, and another by literary critic Chen Xiaoming, an original CLT board member.  From that day until 2020, CCT has explored an ever-widening range of contemporary Chinese intellectual life. Next year we will merge CLT and CCT into a new journal entitled Chinese Literature and Thought Today (CLTT), which will continue the groundbreaking legacies of both journals. As we rush headlong into an unprecedented moment of global challenges, CLTT will tackle larger interdisciplinary issues ranging from pandemics and virality, to ecology and technology, through aesthetic, literary, poetic, and philosophical lenses. Now is the time to think big, to move more flexibly across not only languages but traditional disciplinary boundaries to bring Chinese thought into global conversations responding to the challenges ahead.

We hope you will continue to follow us on our journey and look forward to new announcements and opportunities going forward.

Onward!

Jonathan Stalling, Editor in Chief

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