Yingjin Zhang

China in a polycentric world : essays in Chinese comparative literature

Introduction: engaging Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies Yingjin Zhang Part I. Discipline, Discourse, Canon: 1. The challenge of East-West comparative literature Zhang Longxi 2. The utopias of discourse: on the impossibility of Chinese comparative literature David Palumbo-Liu 3. Canon formation in traditional Chinese poetry: Chinese canons, sacred and profane Mark E. Francis Part II. Gender, Sexuality, Body: 4. A feminist re-vision of Xu Weis Ci Mulan and Nü zhuangyuan Ann-Marie Hsiung 5. Gender, subjectivity, sexuality: defining a subversive discourse in Wang Anyis four tales of sexual transgression Helen H. Chen 6. Consuming Asian women: the fluid body of Josie Packard in Twin Peaks Greta Ai-Yu Niu Part III. Science, Modernity, Aesthetics: 7. Travel and translation: an aspect of chinas cultural modernity, 1862-1926 John Yu Zou 8. Baoyu in Wonderland: technological Utopia in the early modern Chinese science fiction novel Feng-Ying Ming 9. The texture of the metropolis: modernist inscriptions of Shanghai in the 1930s Yingjin Zhang 10. The cult of poetry in contemporary China Michelle Yeh 11. Tianya, the ends of the world or the edge of heaven: comparative literature at the fin de siecle Eugene Chen Eoyang.

Comparative film studies, transnational film studies: interdisciplinarity crossmediality, and transcultural visuality in Chinese cinema

Abstract This article conceives of comparative film studies as a subfield larger than transnational film studies and argues that film studies, apart from rethinking issues of Eurocentrism, should go beyond the imperative of following money and should simultaneously address contextual as well as textual, intertextual and subtextual aspects of film production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Within a general comparative framework, the article identifies neglected and underdeveloped areas in Chinese film studies, such as audience research, piracy matter, literary adaptation, and crossmediality between of film and other arts (theatre, photography, and video). An emphasis on interdisciplinarity is crucial to our understanding of transcultural visuality embodied by film language and technology.

From counter-canon to hypercanon in a postcanonical age: Eileen chang as text and myth

This article revisits the history of canon formation in modern Chinese literary study and explores the complexities and quandaries of literary historiography as evidenced in the case of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 张爱玲). Chang’s change of fortune from counter-canon to hypercanon addresses not simply the aesthetic imperatives of textual production and critical evaluation, but also the contingencies and vicissitudes of literary criticism and the periodic self-refashioning of critical concepts and values. Simultaneously operating as text and myth, the spectacular “Eileen Chang phenomenon” compels us to confront the intertwined issues of canon, discipline, and pedagogy.

Industry and Ideology: A Centennial review of Chinese Cinema

ince Chinas first movie short, Conquering Jun Mountain (1905), Chinese cinema has gone a long way to establish its status as a significant force in international cinema. Like its counterparts elsewhere, Chinese cinema began with a fascination with visual technology, developed from family businesses to competing studios, survived wars and state interference, and has enriched cinematic arts with inventions. To implement a perspective slightly different from other recent surveys, this centennial review of Chinese cinema pays more attention to developments in industry than in ideology, politics, or arts.

Witness Outside History: Play for Alteration in Modern Chinese Culture

Visiting Chair Professor of Shanghai Jiaotong University and Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, San Diego. Among his ten English books are Screening China (2002), Chinese National Cinema (2004), Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (2010), and A Companion to Chinese Cinema (2012). Witness Outside History: Play for Alteration in Modern Chinese Culture

Zhao Dan: spectrality of martyrdom and stardom

Abstract There is an uncanny link between martyrdom and stardom in Zhao Dans film career. In real life he was twice incarcerated for multiple years, and on screen he appeared often as suffering martyrs. His stardom, based on ‘I play myself’ after Crossroads/Shizi jietou (1937), acquired an eerie dimension of spectrality as his self-performance was attuned to a ghostly mechanism engineered by precarious history more than individual subjectivity. Through Zhaos fated star performance of self as others, this study investigates spectrality as an irrational logic that integrated martyrdom and stardom in socialist China.

Eulogistic comedy as domestic soft power: Biopolitical self-fashioning in It's My Day Off (1959)

ABSTRACT Soft power as a concept measures the ability of a nation in obtaining positive outcomes overseas through cultural means, but its core ideas of attraction and credibility are productive in analyzing eulogistic comedys contradictory functions of propagating official policy and refashioning self-interests in socialist China. Its My Day Off (1959) satisfies official expectations of constructing positive models for viewers to emulate, but it also reveals the technology of self-fashioning as a process under surveillance by the Party and the patriarch. A series of comic situations of missed opportunities foreground the logic of instant public recognitions and deferred libidinal gratification that overdetermines socialist self-fashioning as an endless psychic-somatic mechanism of self-othering. Surprisingly, it is by demonstrating the attraction of altruism that the film may have gained its unintended critical edge in disclosing the panoptic biopolitical condition in a socialist utopia.

Chinese film history and historiography

Reflecting on the remarkable rise of Chinese film studies, Paul G. Pickowicz observes that, merely 35 years ago, world-wide scholars knew little about Chinese cinema, yet now ‘scholarly interest in Chinese cinema is on the verge of overtaking or perhaps has already overtaken interest in modern Chinese literature’ (Huang 2014, vii), at least so in English scholarship. A sure sign of the maturity of Chinese film studies is the recent publication of three comprehensive volumes in English that cover various territories, trajectories, and historiographies (Lim and Ward 2011), investigating different aspects of history and geography, industry and institution, arts and media (Zhang 2013), and reevaluate competing interpretations of history, form, and structure (Rojas and Chow 2013). None of these volumes aspires to be a general history of Chinese cinema (as in Zhang 2004), but historiography remains a central organizing principle in all three. Another common feature of these volumes is the endeavor to move beyond the previously dominant national cinema paradigm (as in Hu 2003), which has been increasingly critiqued from the perspectives of polylocality (Zhang 2010, 16 28) and Sinophone cinema (Yue and Khoo 2014). This article represents my latest attempt at tracking the development of Chinese film history and historiography (Zhang 2000). One entrenched habit of film historiography is binary thinking, which has previously instituted the dominance of center over periphery, elite over popular, progressive over conservative, arts over industry, auteurs over institution, classical cinema over early cinema, fiction over documentary, the West over the non-West, and so on. In Chinese film studies, such binary habit is most pronounced in the 1963 official film history (Cheng, Li, and Xing 1963), which constructs a narrative exclusively centered on perceived struggles between the Communist (or Left-wing) versus the Nationalist (or Right-wing). At a subtle level, binary thinking is still operational in the narrativization of film history in terms of Shanghai versus Yan’an (Clark 1987), commercial cinema versus Left-wing cinema (Pang 2002), or Shanghai versus Hong Kong (Fu 2003). To reiterate my earlier call for moving ‘beyond binary imagination’ (Zhang 2008), I seek to map the latest development in Chinese film historiography by reviewing four new books on early Chinese cinema in relation to other recent scholarship in the field. In my view, Huang (2014) and Liao (2015) have both consolidated the global or transnational perspective on Chinese cinema, Bao (2015) has intervened in the emergent exploration of

Playing with Intertextuality and Contextuality: Film Piracy On and Off the Chinese Screen

This chapter examines piracy as a challenging issue that cuts across the interconnected, overlapping domains of film, law, market, morality, creativity, and democracy. Rather than endorsing the global media industry’s outright condemnation of film piracy as an illegal practice in need of stringent control and eventual eradication, I am interested in both the intertextuality and the contextuality of film piracy in China.

The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender

An exploration is presented of the ways in which the city and urban life have been represented in modern Chinese literature and film; based on three aims: to trace the literary and filmic configurations (i.e. symbolic constructions) of the city in modern Other CABI sites 