CFP for 2023 AAS Panel “Metaliterature in the Chinese Tradition and Beyond
We are looking for another panelist to join our 2023 AAS panel on metaliterature in the Chinese tradition. Ideally, the panelist can present on materials from the modern/contemporary period either in their own right or in relation to premodern materials. Comparative works that engage with non-Chinese traditions are also welcome. Please express your interest by July 15, 2022 via email. We are hoping to receive the complete paper abstract by August 1, 2022.
Many thanks,
Kangni Huang (kangni_huang@g.harvard.edu)
Fangdai Chen (fangdaichen@ln.edu.hk)
Metaliterature in the Chinese Tradition and Beyond
Chair: Michael Fuller (University of California, Irvine)
Discussant: Daniel Fried (University of Alberta, Canada)
Current Panelists: Jack Chen (University of Virginia); Kangni Huang (Harvard University) (co-organizer); Fangdai Chen (Lingnan University, Hong Kong) (co-organizer)
Panel Abstract:
Metaliterature can be defined in many ways. In broad terms, any literary texts explicitly or implicitly reflecting on forms, style, and/or functions of literature may be considered metaliterature. In short, metaliterature attends to literature’s existential conditions and implications. While metaliterature and its metaliterary consciousness have played an indispensable role in the development of the Chinese literary tradition from ancient times to the contemporary era, they have not received sufficient attention in the extant paradigm of Chinese literary and cultural studies. In an increasingly globalized and digitalized world where literature’s formal qualities and social responsibilities are constantly called into question with regards to today’s pressing calamities, it is never so timely to deploy metaliterature as a conceptual framework to examine the historical and current states of Chinese literariness. Authors in premodern China discussed the nature and function of literature across different genres. There were numerous poems, stories, and plays portraying communal and individual literary composition and reading practices. Ming dynasty (1368-1644) novels, such as Xiyou ji (Journey to the West) and Jin ping mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), often incorporate poetic composition to create ironic tension, thus pointing to literature’s potential to consciously sustain multiple meanings through the interplay of genres and forms. In modern and contemporary China, the rise of the “Avant-Garde School” in the 1980s epitomizes a rebellious re-emergence of metaliterary consciousness as novelists like Can Xue and Ma Yuan experimented with the limits of aesthetic conventions in order for literature to de-paralyze itself from the previously state-run cultural enterprise. In other words, the metafictional works produced by these avant-garde writers were predominantly concerned with literature’s autonomy and power of dissent. In engaging with case studies from premodern to contemporary China, the panel probes the following questions:
- What gave rise to metaliterature in the first place? And by consequence, how do we (re-)define and demarcate “metaliterature” to begin with? If the issue of literariness is already the central concern of traditional literary criticism, what new inquiries and contributions does the self-consciousness of metaliterature bring to the table?
- To a large extent, metaliterature manifests its self-consciousness through recourse to aesthetic tools that allow it to reflect on its very aesthetic being. What aesthetic and even sociopolitical implications does this involutionary – turning toward itself – production lead to?
- How does metaliterature as a theoretical tool help us resituate Chinese literariness within its local tradition as well as in relation to non-Chinese traditions?