A Report on Modern Chinese Literary Studies in the English-Speaking World
David Der-wei Wang
Columbia University
As a discipline, modern Chinese literary studies rose in the nineteen fifties when
C. T. Hsia and Jaruslav Prusek, in the United States and Europe respectively, launched
comprehensive surveys of Chinese literary and cultural dynamics from the late Qing to
contemporary times.
The two scholars clearly differed in historical stance and
theoretical training. Whereas Hsia based his analyses on Anglo-American New Criticism
and the Leavisian notion of a “Great Tradition,” Prusek derived his methodology from a
humanist vein of Marxism and continental Formalism.
The theoretical and ideological
disagreement between the two was dramatized by their feisty 1963 written debates on the
nature of Chinese literary modernity and the function of criticism.
For all their differences, both Hsia and Prusek committed themselves seriously to
writers, works, issues, and phenomena which had been hitherto unexplored by scholars of
Chinese studies. They both commanded a magisterial style in research and teaching,
and they both oversaw the rise of a group of distinguished followers. Their principles,
such as “obsession with China” (Hsia) and “the lyrical versus the epic” (Prusek), were
treated until recent years as paradigms for modern Chinese literary studies.
In the wake of these pioneering works by Hsia and Prusek, two more scholarly
endeavors came into view.
In 1968, T.A. Hsia, C.T. Hsia’s brother, published
(posthumously) his Gate of Darkness, a critical overview of the aesthetics and politics of
the Chinese leftist camp, from the twenties through the fifties. Though well informed of
Western methodologies, Hsia never fell prey to any then-dominant school; instead he
managed to craft a study rich with personal insights and historical sensibility.
In 1973,
Leo Ou-fan Lee presented his book The Romantic Generation of Chinese Literature,
which, as its title made clear, argued for the notion of a literary discourse and life style
that were characteristic of one generation of Chinese writers-cum-revolutionaries. The
book demonstrated Lee’s combined interest in literary, cultural, and biographical history;
it provided a model of scholarship yet to be achieved by subsequent scholars.
From the late sixties to the eighties, there appeared a series of studies which
instead focused on single authors. These studies included Ba Jing (by Olga Lang), Qian
Zhongshu (by Theodore Huters), Dai Wangshu (Gregory Lee), Ding Ling (by I-tsi Mei
Fewerwerker), Lao She (by Ranbir Vohra), Mao Dun (by Márian Gálik), and Shen
Congwen (by Jeffrey Kinkley), Xiao Hong (by Howard Goldblatt), Zhou Zuoren (David
Pollard). This trend culminated in 1986-1987, with the appearance of two critical works
on Lu Xun, by William Lyell and Leo Lee respectively.
Meanwhile, other critics
undertook studies of distinctive genres, phenomena, and movements of the preceding
century, as represented by V. I. Semanov’s and Milená Delezelová’s research on late Qing
fiction and its successors, Perry Link’s and Liu Ts’un-yan’s study of the “Mandarin
Ducks and Butterflies fiction” or “middle brow literature” in the late Qing and
Republican era, Mau-sang Ng’s and Patrick Hanan’s comparative surveys of Chinese
writers and their Russian models, Edward Gunn’s reappraisal of the writers of wartime
Shanghai as “Unwelcome Muses,” Rudolf Wagner’s, Douwe Fokkema’s, Bonnie
Mcdougall’s, Merle Goldman’s and C.T. Hsia’s observations of the literary politics of the
early PRC years, and Michael Duke’s and Jeffrey Kinkley’s introduction to the
rejuvenated PRC fashion for “blooming and contending” after the death of Mao.
In addition, the advent of the journal Modern Chinese Literature (ed. Howard
Goldblatt), together with large-scaled conference volumes, such as Chinese Literature in
the May Fourth Era (ed. Merle Goldman), The Legacy of Lu Xun (ed. Leo Lee), and
Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (ed. Jeannette Faurot), and a sizable number of anthologies
and translations, also contributed to the dynamics of the field.
By the early nineties, one
could already say that modern Chinese literature and culture had become one of Chinese
studies’ most thriving areas.
The nineties saw remarkable changes in the field, in at least the following three
interrelated directions. First, theory found an increasingly prominent position in the
practice of research and criticism. While this tendency reflects scholar’s and students’
conscientious efforts to upgrade their critical tools, so as to better master their subjects, it
represents no less an East Asian response to the general “theoretical turn” that spread
throughout humanities departments in American academia during and after the eighties.
Rey Chow’s book, Woman and Chinese Modernity (1990), may well serve as an example,
for its timely appearance at the very beginning of the decade, its open embrace of theories
from feminism to Marxism to psychoanalysis to post-colonial critique, and its open
defiance of extant paradigms.
In the same year of 1990, the Association of Chinese and
Comparative Literature launched its inaugural conference at Duke University by
highlighting “Politics, Ideology, and Chinese Literature: Theoretical Interventions and
Cultural Critique”. Thus, in a public forum, the conference announced the arrival of a
“theoretical age” in Chinese literary studies.
In the following years one would see a
long list of works aimed at “theoretical interventions” and “cultural critiques.”
I have more to say about the relations between theory and modern Chinese
literary studies.
Let it be understood at this point that I am denigrating neither the
power of theory nor the nobility of theoretical commitment.
Precisely because I
recognize that all effective acts of scholarship are at the same time expressions of
theoretical engagement, and that dominant paradigms can always be shaken by stimuli
from deliberate provocations, I hope to solicit more from what has already been done.
I
want to argue that, despite an apparent plethora of published isms and neologisms, we
have not done theory justice, in the sense that all too often we have hurriedly echoed
academically popular discourses, mouthing magical phrases that are but paraphrases of
our critical masters.
In the end, we seem to have institutionalized and standardized
critique in such a way, as to erase, rather than enforce, the freedom and creativity which
critique was expected to produce. Accordingly, it may not be an overstatement to find
some “theoretical interventions” nothing more than exercises in the application of
dominant academic ideas, and to see our “cultural critiques” as hardly more than
importing to China the latest fashions from the intellectual boutiques of Europe.
Secondly, the New Wave in Chinese studies expanded the field, from literature of
the traditional kind into territories such as film (Yingjin Zhang), music (Andrew Jones),
intellectual history (Kirk Denton), aesthetics (Ban Wang), “translingual practice” (Lydia
Liu), cultural production (Michel Hockx), popular culture (Jing Wang), gender studies
(Xueping Zhong), urban studies (Leo Lee), colonial studies (Rey Chow), political studies
(Perry Link), and anthropological studies (Gang Yue). Concomitant with this was the
rise of “cultural studies,” a discipline that vowed to study modern Chinese culture in a
more wholesome manner. Among the newly discovered subjects, film stands out as the
most popular.
When in 1990, film played only a subordinate role at a major
international conference, such as the one on “From May-Fourth to June-Fourth”
(coordinated by Ellen Widmer and David Wang) held at Harvard, the genre now
commands far more enthusiasm from conferences, research projects, publications, and
classrooms than does its textual counterpart.
The mushrooming of individual film
studies, anthologies, critical interviews, and encyclopedic references (like the one edited
by Yingjin Zhang) all testify to its vitality.
These diversified approaches to, and modifications of, the traditional form of
literary study should be treated as welcome.
After all, the concept and practice of
“literature” and “literary studies” are historically motivated, thereby subject to different
historical manifestations.
The “cultural studies” fever, on the other hand, reflects the
revival of the “engagé” practice of Prusek and the brothers Hsia, as academics and critics
seek once again to redefine the relations between textual studies (now defined either in
structuralist or post-structuralist terms) and extra-textual issues (once again including
gender, ethnic subjectivity, visuality, everyday life, diaspora, statehood, national policy
and so forth). Thus, when in 1998, the East Asian Department of Ohio State University
took over the journal Modern Chinese Literature and renamed it Modern Chinese
Literature and Culture, it seemed to be a telling sign of the changing configuration of the
field.
(Or perhaps it merely signaled that twentieth-century literature had receded into
the past, thereby joining Classical Chinese Civilization as a period—to be viewed from
the outside, with literature a mere aspect of culture.)
The multiple approaches to literature and culture may indicate interdisciplinary
vigor, mobilizing scholars to open up their domains and facilitating dialogue with other
fields.
Hence discussions of a new matrix of cultural politics in post-Maoist modernist
experimentation (Jing Wang), or of a “sublime figure” in the making of Chinese
totalitarian discourse (Ban Wang).
Nevertheless, there can be moments when
ill-prepared interdisciplinary studies may backfire, bringing about works of nothing more
than eclecticism or, worse, dilettantism and opportunism.
In the mass pursuit of cultural
and interdisciplinary subjects, rigor and persistence are harder to find than in earlier times,
when academic institutions were few and it was easy to believe that criticism was the
occupation of a few great minds.
Above all, the advent of instant interdisciplinary expertise prods one to reconsider
the problematic of representation.
By this I mean not only representation as artistic
mediation but also representation as a willed identification with, or disavowal of, a
(fashionable) cause, subject, genre, or academic clique.
The “breaking of the
boundaries,” as the 1990’s saw it, seems to have come about too quick and too easily.
Conventionally, in premodern China and Europe alike, the literary elite seem to have had
an earnest ability to celebrate its own privileged critical view, as if literacy and status
somehow conferred not the privilege of insight, but the truth of its insights.
A truly
engaged critic is not one that has learned how to write an eight-legged essay of
remonstrance or critique; he or she has to continuously review the delicate balance
between representing his or her own profession and representing the arguably “real”
issues of the time.
The third direction of our field is in a renewed interest in historical discourse.
Much in contrast to the literary histories of Prusek’s and C. T. Hsia’s time, when
identification of periods, events, masters, and classics along a coherent timeline was held
as mandatory, the newer inquiries take issue with the hegemony of “master narratives,”
questions the linear procession of temporality, and uphold ways to “rewrite history.”
This momentum of rewriting history was no doubt inspired by both the post-structuralist
vein of meta-history and the post-Marxist re-call to “always historicize!”
For Chinese,
(literary) history itself, from the thawing of Maoist discourse to the New Geopolitics
applied to Chinese communities, must have provided no less impetus. Therefore one
sees, for example, works that reassess Lu Ling, a talented disciple of Hu Feng persecuted
under the rule of Mao (Kirk Denton, Yunzhong Shu); highlight (post) modernisms from
Taiwan and Hong Kong (Yvonne Chang, Akbar Abbas); contemplate the “repressed
modernities” of the late Qing fiction (David Wang); credit an eclipsed genre such as
reportage (Charles Laughlin); and most prominently, sanction the “semi-colonial,”
decadent culture of Shanghai (Leo Lee, Shu-mei Shih).
One notion most often referred to in this revisitation of modern Chinese literary
history is modernity. Given the name of the field , “modernity” or “modern” seems to
be a self-renewing focus for scholarly contestation; admittedly an array of stimulating
ideas and data has been solicited as a result. But have we yet engaged in dialogue with
the other side of modernity, namely, historicity?
in deference to modern contentions, far from it.
I do not mean history has been ignored
I do mean history as it is has been
practiced, either deconstructed to the exclusion of material grounding or recaptured in a
dogmatic form, and thereby once again reified.
Instead of a singular modernity and a singular historicity, I suggest that we
confront these two notions in dialogical terms, reading them as that which are endowed
with a multitude of temporalities, mappings, premises, forms, practices, and “historical
consciounesses”.
This endeavor, be it called Foucauldian genealogy, Benjaminian task
of mourning, or Zhang Taiyan-like allegorical exegesis, commands an intense rethinking
of historicity, if not of history per se.
But there is something more fundamental to it.
To call modern Chinese literature “modern” or “postmodern,” one must genuinely believe
that Chinese writers are capable of producing things that have not already been imagined
or enacted by modernists in other, more historically “privileged” civilizations. And to
engage in modern Chinese literary criticism, one must makes it one’s own obligation to
identify the aspects of Chinese literature whose “newness” cannot be couched in
ready-made critical terms.
Europeans and others in their thrall are readily willing to
agree that Maoist China produced many novel forms of deception, cruelty, and betrayal,
literary and otherwise; but they are not willing to call them “modern” or “postmodern” in
any significant sense, as that would put into question the idea that there is a privileged
place or form where “modernity” springs forth as a true critique of and irrefutable
replacement for “premodernity”.
Looking at Maoist or post-Maoist China in search of
instances of merely Foucauldian or Benjaminian forms of modernity is to leave China
outside of history, if by “history” we mean the privilege of doing something new, of
“critiquing” the assumptions of the past.
Fifty years after the pioneering work done by critics such as Prusek and C. T. Hsia,
we are in a better position than before to raise questions regarding the agencies of theory
and criticism and their impacts on the changing paradigm of modern Chinese literary
history. We may ask: inasmuch as the literary modern is a phenomenon presupposing a
break up of temporality, a re-form of formal conventions, and a cross-cultural and
trans-national acquisition of knowledges and sensibilities, to what extent does our
renewed interest in literary history not only critique but also instantiate the unique
conditions of the Chinese search for literary modernity?
How does one construe the
paradox that a critic’s "blindness" in embracing Western theories often lends an "insight"
into aspects of modern Chinese literature or vise versa?
Is it likely that, for all his or her
alignment with Western discourses, a critic may entertain a personal belief rooted in his
indigenous heritage?
Finally, can one find a ground where earlier critics’
cosmopolitanism, which stresses universality and truth values, can reciprocate with the
various forms of "particularism" in terms of postmodern textuality, gender, ethnicity,
cultural production, among others, that seem to have captivated recent critics' hearts?
With the above observations in mind, I would like to anticipate projects that may
illuminate the following prospects:
1. Projects that engage in a meta-critical view of modern Chinese literary criticism and
history from the late Qing to the last decade of the twentieth century. These projects are
expected not to take “criticism” or “history” as a task that assumes an a priori theoretical
or moral superiority, as all too often is the case.
In face with many contemporary critics’
lament that we have yet to see the “right” criticism or “right” history appear, one may
retort by saying that one paradox of twentieth-century Chinese literary studies may lie in
not a shortage, but an excess, of critical desires and historical engagements. (The
overabundance of the Maoist literary criticisms and histories from the forties to the
eighties, it will be recalled, all started with a sincere wish to critique, inculcate, and
rectify, only quickly themselves to be reified into truisms and obligations). The new
projects should enable us to evaluate our own position as part of modern Chinese history
by refreshing figures, works, movements and debates that have constituted Chinese
literature from the 1840’s to the end of the century; assess the enunciative endeavors,
ranging from classical treatises to avant-garde experiments, foreign thoughts and native
ruminations, that have informed the critical discourse; and observe the historical factors
affecting the interplay of Chinese (post)modernities across communities, on the mainland,
in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and overseas. Kirk Denton’s anthology Modern Chinese
Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945, has done the groundwork for any
future attempt along this line. But his is an anthology of original texts. A Chinese book
by Chen Pingyuan of Peking University, Zhongguo xiandai xueshu zhijianli (The
founding of modern Chinese scholarly learning, 1998), may be an even better model.
2. Projects that address the continued interplay between history and literature. The
mutual implication of historicity and (fictional) narrativity, to be sure, has always been
the case in Chinese historiographical and literary studies. But never have we seen such
a moment as we have in modern times, when official history has been so dictated by the
ideological and institutional imaginary as to verge on the discourse of make-believe, a
discourse often associated with traditional fiction, and fiction so arrested by a desire to
reflect the past and future as to appropriate the functions of traditional history with
respect to completed fact. Hence the genesis of the peculiar double-bind of Chinese
literary modernity.
The late Marston Anderson’s The Limits of Realism: Chinese
Literature in the Revolutionary Period and my forthcoming book, The Monster That Is
History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in 20th Century China can be invoked as
examples.
3. Projects that truly engage in remapping generic, disciplinary, and geopoetic
cartography.
The twentieth century saw China constantly shifting among political,
historical, and literary entities, each reciting its own self-narrative and pursuing its own
idea of (post)modernity.
Thanks to this historical fact of fragmentation and dispersal,
writers have been made to interpret the Chinese experience in ways that were difficult to
marshal into a stifling unity. While the canon of one community might be the taboo of
another, apparently antagonistic discourses in fact shared uncannily similar premises.
(One can find no better an example than the confrontation and complicity of pro- and
anti-communist fiction of the fifties, in terms of stylistics, thematics, and modes of
production. Speaking of “revolution plus love,” the formula subject of leftist literature
in the thirties, how often do we think of its residual traces in Taiwan or even in the
Chinese community of Malaysia in a postmodern era?)
Today, critics have been enabled to read modern Chinese literature and
history with a multiplicity of global tools and theories. Yet is it not a paradox that
critics can subscribe to a “politics of marginality” and a “polemics of intervention,” or
seek “global contextualization” with “local articulation,” while rigidly marginalizing all
forms of Chinese modernity (and historicity) that did not emerge within some
preconceived mainstream, and resolutely refusing to articulate the local contexts of
modern Chinese creativity?
In this sense, the familiar statement “always historicize!”
can at best be understood as one of self-parody, saying “always historicize as we
Europeans (or Americans) do!”
If one of the most important lessons one can learn from
modern Chinese literature and history is the tortuous nature of Chinese writers’ attempt to
grapple with polymorphous reality, then this knowledge can be appreciated in full only by
a criticism equally exempt from formulaic dogma and ideological blindness.
One has to
genuinely believe that Chinese writers have been and still are capable of complex and
creative thought even at moments of political suppression and personal humility.
I
argue that any critical endeavor in the name of “modernity” must look unafraid at this
historical reality, which seems to be that of contested modernities.
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