Ban Wang

Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in Wang Anyi's Song of Unending Sorrow

universal right of all to be free, the shared essence or identity of all human subjects to be autonomous” (Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” inThe Eagleton Reader, ed. Stephen Regan [Oxford: Blackwell, 1998], 363). But this universal equality does not mean to level out differences. On the contrary, “the only point of enjoying such universal abstract equality is to discover and live one’s own particular difference” (ibid.). Without the abstract rights and universal freedom that every individual is entitled to, one cannot even have the opportunity to act out a private, individual trajectory and imagine an alternative temporal horizon. See ibid., 359–369. 9 I situate memory, as most critics of modernity have done, within the problematic of modernity and tradition, in the tension between society and community. This is a long line of tradition in the West that includes Ferdinand Tönnies with his influential distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and others. With the advent of the market and capitalist modernity in China, this analysis becomes very relevant and illuminating. One needs to be cautious, of course, about the rigid polarity of the distinction and should approach modern and traditional more as interwoven and still interweaving strands. For an elaborate discussion of this problematic see Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (New York: Arno Press, 1975). 10 Marx, Capital, 83; Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chstel, 1967). 11 Wolfgang Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Robert Bock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),

History in a mythical key: temporality, memory, and tradition in Wang Anyi's fiction

Ruptures of the social fabrics accompany Chinas rapid pace of development and its integration into the global market, severing the connection between cultural memory and history. Increasingly abstracted into economic, administrative, and exchange processes, the matrix of meaning and values that used to connect individuals to society and the past to the present has lost its self-evidence and cohesive power. In the emergent society of consumption and mass media the older Marxian notion of history as social and political practice is receding from public purview and Chinas past is being dissolved into spectacles. The 1980s critique of the grand narrative was taken over by the liberal-consumerist erasure of history under the spell of global capital. Cultural production has exhibited a downturn to the immediate and the everyday, to consumptive practices and frivolous pleasure. In opposition to this there arose a striving for renewed engagement with history, an intensified attempt to seek possibilities in the past for understanding and responding to swift changes. Wang Anyis fiction epitomizes a serious engagement with history. This essay focuses on the mythical motif in Wangs fiction that draws on memory, associated with legend, folklore, and tradition, to critique the accelerative thrust of modern history. The novel Reality and Fiction (Jishi yu xugou) represents a poignant attempt to invoke a primordial history steeped in myth. The short story ‘Marriage of the Fairies’ (‘Tianxian pei’) illustrates the way memory can be a strong resource that binds a group into a community under the exigency of change as well as a critique of modernity.

Third World Internationalism: Films and Operas in the Chinese Cultural Revolution

“Eight hundred million people watching eight shows” is a cruel joke about the barrenness of culture during the Cultural Revolution. But in recent years, scholars such as Paul Clark and Barbara Mittler, among others, have demonstrated that there was life—and much of it quite interesting and vibrant—in the proverbial cultural desert. In his book The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Clark offers insights into cultural innovations and professional perfectionism beyond the conventional narratives of elite power games in high places. Listening attentively beneath the loud noise of propaganda to the muffled music of artistic experiment and innovation, Clark shows that an undercurrent of cultural life was still going on, and creating a new aesthetics.1 Taking a long view of China’s revolutionary history, Barbara Mittler, in her A Continuous Revolution, decries the myth that the Cultural Revolution is something radically new and disruptive.

Confucianism and Nature: Ecological Motifs in Kang Youwei's Great Community

In recent decades, environmental writers have been turning to Chinese traditions of thought for ecological wisdom. Challenging the anthropocentric worldview that privileges human dominion over nature, they have recovered from Chinese classics alternative concepts regarding humanitys reciprocal relations with the natural world. Buddhism and Taoism, the most suitable candidates for this search, articulate cosmologies in which all life forms are embedded, interconnect, and circulate. Confucianism, conventionally seen as a moral doctrine centered on familial and kinship relations, has also become a treasure trove for advancing ecological worldviews. To Mary Evelyn Tucker, Confucian ecological thought may provide an alternative environmentalist view…

Morality, Aesthetics, and World Literature in Liang Qichao

Inspired by his reading of Lord Byrons notion of world poetry and Kang Youweis idea of datong , the ideal of the great world community, Chinese modernist writer Liang Qichao used his fiction to articulate a vision of national cultures constructed on the foundation of equality and mutual respect among nations without one culture dominating others.

Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity--China, 1900-1937

Preface 1. Introduction: the problem of language in cross-cultural studies Part I. Between the Nation and the Individual: 2. Translating national character Lu Xun and Arthur Smith 3. The discourse of individualism Part II. Translingual modes of representation: 4. Homo Economicus and the question of novelistic realism 5. Narratives of desire: negotiating the real and the fantastic 6. The deixis of writing in the first person Part III. National Building and Culture Building: 7. Literary criticism as a discourse of legitimation 8. The making of the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature 9. Rethinking culture and national essence Appendixes Notes Index.