{"title":"Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Romantic","authors":"B. Linder","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1917259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1917259","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"88 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48814600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Soirée in the Spring","authors":"Wenying Zhu, Yvette Zhu","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1917253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1917253","url":null,"abstract":"“Soirée in the Spring” was first published in Zuojia in 2016. The story takes place in Berlin and Shanghai and follows the love affair of a young academic. In a society where the shadow of class stratification is as dense as the intoxicating fog on riverbanks, the young academic slowly wakes up from the illusion of love to the reality of life. As the story unfolds, she must find a way to penetrate the cloak of shadow and to break free. Yet, will she? The embedded narrative structure of the novella facilitates the juxtaposition of time and space, impression and substance, the hunter and the prey as the protagonist navigates her own inner discovery.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"66 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42337815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Just Come Along: Six Poems","authors":"Y. Gong, J. Shea, D. Tse","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1916372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1916372","url":null,"abstract":"This selection of Yam Gong’s poems demonstrates his signature style, which includes mixing colloquial language (Cantonese) and everyday life with a philosophical acuity, direct address with paradox, and various lexical registers, such as dialogue, idioms, prayers, slang, and song lyrics. Yam Gong also writes with an internationalist outlook, using allusions to world literature, international news reports, and foreign languages in his work. His poem “Méditation,” for instance, refers to Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs and recasts the story of a fourth century Alexandrian courtesan in a Hong Kong setting. These poems are from Yam Gong’s book And So Moving a Stone You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2010).","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"46 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44561998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wandering the Garden, Waking from a Dream","authors":"C. Rojas","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1916369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1916369","url":null,"abstract":"Through a comparative analysis of Yan Lianke’s The Day the Sun Died with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Lu Xun’s almost precisely contemporaneous collection Call to Arms, this essay considers the ways in which Yan Lianke’s novel uses motifs of death and “dreamwalking” to reflect on more abstract processes of representation and textual mediation. In particular, this essay argues that the trope of somnambulism in The Day the Sun Died is not merely an example of Yan’s mythorealist representational approach, it simultaneously offers a useful framework through which to understand mythorealism’s underlying representational logic.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"25 - 33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45307502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Small Endless Sorrow of the South","authors":"Qinghua Zhang, Yvette Zhu","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1917257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1917257","url":null,"abstract":"In this short essay, Zhang Qinghua discourses on three aspects of Zhu Wenying’s novel Aunt Lili’s Small South (Lili yima de xixiao nanfang 莉莉姨妈的细小南方). He argues that the ineluctable qualities of the novel lie within its juxtaposition of small history and grand history through the protagonist Aunt Lili and the first-person narrator. By doing so, Zhu Wenying has given us a re-telling of the persistent cultural history of the South in the delicate setting of Suzhou.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"81 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48283901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"2014 Nomination Statement","authors":"C. Rojas","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1925512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1925512","url":null,"abstract":"c h in se lera tu re to d ay v o l. 10 n . 1 contemporary Chinese history and reality. By telling the story of the village of Shouhuo, a place of collective seclusion that resembles the utopia depicted by Tao Yuanming in his famous “Peach Blossom Spring,” Yan Lianke poignantly questions both the Communist utopian dream of the revolutionary period and the economic utopian dream of the market-reform era. In this novel, the mixture of realism and surrealism, heaviness and lightness, paradoxically makes the real compelling, essential, and apocalyptic, moving beyond any kind of textual playfulness. Yan Lianke’s masterpiece The Four Books, which is regarded as one of his most imaginative creations, has touched upon the Great Famine that was a forbidden and sensitive topic in mainland China. Echoing the texts of Confucianism and the four Gospels of the New Testament, The Four Books has provided four different narrative voices, which interweave the tapestry of life and death, body and soul, and put Chinese intellectuals represented by the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian, and Technician in the unbearable ordeal to show the complexity of human nature. Showing a philosophical dimension that is often lacking in modern Chinese literature, this novel is extremely innovative in narrative structure and language, powerfully representing one of China’s most traumatic periods. With thrilling action, unforgettable characters, an ingenious structure, exquisite language, Yan Lianke’s Four Books takes inspiration not only from Latin America’s magic realism and Russian naturalism, and particularly Dostoyevsky’s fascination with human suffering and glory, and I am convinced that they will increasingly become recognized as landmark achievements in world literature. Virtually all of Yan Lianke’s writings directly confront, at the level of their content, the history and reality of post-1949 China, together with questions of systems, power, and the humanity’s position under the revolution. In artistic terms, he skillfully absorbs Kafka’s absurdism as well as America’s black humor, while at the level of his structure and narrative he repeatedly reinvents himself, overturning readers’ assumptions and expectations. These qualities have combined to make Yan Lianke one of contemporary China’s most distinctive and celebrated authors.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"7 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43503433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Village Greater than the World: Acceptance Speech for the 2021 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature","authors":"Lianke Yan, Eric Abrahamsen","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1916366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1916366","url":null,"abstract":"In Yan Lianke’s works, the village is always a microcosm of China’s history. In Yan’s acceptance speech of the 2021 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, he declares that the village of his homeland is truly all of China entire, and even greater than the world. All the possibilities of humanity exist inside that village. As a writer, he is committed to discovering the connections between the village and the rest of the human world in his literature.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"12 - 15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45593475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History","authors":"Amir Khan","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1917261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1917261","url":null,"abstract":"For whom is the future of Chinese history an issue? The easy answer is that the control of China’s narrative, about its past and possible future, belongs squarely to the Chinese people. Yet through her penetrating analysis of Chinese cinema and society, Dai Jinhua shows how this battle for control cuts across global class lines. China’s future is not merely of quaint concern to its citizens in accounting for its own civilizational import and goals; rather, as Dai ominously puts it in her introduction, the imaginative burden on China is of world-historical urgency “because China must be a China of the future, or there will be no future” (22). How can this be? This volume of seven remarkable essays, organized thematically in three parts, constitutes a solid and durable intellectual primer on the thinking of Dai Jinhua. Her work is noteworthy not simply to those working in some specialized niche of film study (say, “Asian” or “world” cinemas) but to anyone interested in the expressive possibilities of the medium and what directors on the receiving end of Hollywood influence are up against. After going through Dai’s work, one begins to reorient one’s bearings; it is not global or Chinese cinema doing something at the margins of mainstream cinematic thoroughfare; rather, the only hope for renewing mainstream filmic possibilities comes from such “global” cinemas. Hollywood and even European art-house films have become conventional hence marginal. Yet, the renewal of such possibility is hardly guaranteed. Any such promise is likely to be subsumed under a certain class decimation. What Chinese cinema must contest is not the demands for blockbuster entertainment created at the behest of its rich entrepreneurial class on the one hand nor the cheap and easy mass consumption by its proletarian working class on the other. Rather, the newly minted Chinese middle class is the greatest threat to the expressive possibility of cinema. The success of Chinese war films in the early twenty-first century (Lu Chuan’s 2009 blockbuster, City of Life and Death specifically, which details the twentieth century Nanking massacre/holocaust perpetrated against China by the Japanese), for example, are not indicative to Dai of cheap nationalist jingoism suited to the masses but of a middle class desire for a type of cosmopolitan global recognition:","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"90 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47573144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Secrets, Confrontation, and Alienation","authors":"Hong Zhang, Yvette Zhu","doi":"10.1080/21514399.2021.1916373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2021.1916373","url":null,"abstract":"In this interview, writer Zhu Wenying spoke to Zhang Hong, the Deputy Editor in Chief of Guangzhou Literature and Art Newspaper, about her earlier writings and what her earlier work attempted to accomplish.","PeriodicalId":29859,"journal":{"name":"Chinese Literature Today","volume":"10 1","pages":"54 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43857592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}