Marginalization, Violence and Sufferings in the Novels of Mo Yan (original) (raw)
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History, identity, and the marginalized: an analysis of selected works by Han Shaogong and Su Tong
1993
Since Deng Xiaoping's liberalization of art and literature in 1977, literature in the People's Republic of China has shown rapid development. While there are indisputably many sides to the "new" fiction of the Post-Mao era (1977 to present), the substance of the change can be summarized by saying that such works reflect an overall "return of the individual" to modern Chinese fiction, in terms of characterization, authorial style, and personal vision. This thesis examines the return of the individual from the specific angle of marginalized character and motif, since they are frequently used by contemporary writers to express an individual and often subversive perspective in fiction. The contemporary writers Han Shaogong and Su Tong both make use of marginalized character types and marginalized motifs in some of their key works. In the four texts presented here, "Ba, ba, ba" and "Three Women" by Han Shaogong, and "1934 Escapes"...
This project addresses the concept of postmodern alienation in post-Mao Chinese fiction, especially fiction published after 1985. The principle authors of this discussion are Liu Heng, Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Mo Yan, all of whom are writers of the so-called ‘new generation’ (wan shengdai). It is an almost unanimous opinion of readers and critics alike that these writers offer a counterhegemonial assessment of China’s past and present alike. This project comprises five chapters. The first chapter introduces the concepts of alienation and postmodernism and gives an assessment of the field and the theme to date. Only very recently has the concept of alienation been resuscitated as postmodern alienation. Postmodern alienation signifies the correlation of postmodern socio-cultural change and individual experience. Ihab Hassan names three main attributes of postmodern alienation: discontinuity, fragmentation, and Lyotard’s concept of unrepresentability. At its best, postmodern alienation is delayed accommodation. At its worst, it is an alienation from life itself. In post-Mao fiction postmodern alienation appears at its worst. As a literary theme, the comprehensiveness of discontinuity, fragmentation, and unrepresentability translate into the motif of the unlived life. The unlived life is a wasted life of missed opportunities, opportunities never had, premature death, the inability to position oneself. To many of these characters to have been born is the greatest dilemma of life. The second chapter discusses the context of the unlived life: discontinuity. It is placed in fictions of change, especially historiographic fiction. Through the rewriting of history as haphazard events, writers question both the knowledge of the past and its representation. Chapter Three provides the content of the unlived life. The lack of a frame of reference, be it personal or historical, is experienced in fragmentation and void. It results in the inability to position oneself and in a view of life as wasted. Chapter Four deals with violence, which has been identified as the outcome of the unlived life. It is not only an expression of discontent, but also of unrepresentability. Through the writing of violence, the authors seek to speak what has hitherto been unspeakable. Chapter Five summarizes the findings and suggests that the motif of the unlived life is a rhetoric of crisis. It persuades the reader of a crisis of transition in order to create a new consciousness about the past, the present, and the problem of representation.
2013 A Gun Is Not a Woman: Local Subjectivity in Mo Yan's Novel Tanxiang xing
Mo Yan's historical novel Sandalwood Death revisits the Boxer Uprising, exploring a local structure of feeling from the point of view of oral transmissions that, one hundred years after the events, appears gradually to be receding into oblivion. It is a project of recuperation or, rather, aesthetic reconstruction of local knowledge. The staging of a variety of local performances, such as Maoqiang opera, seasonal festivals, military and religious parades, as well as of scenes of excessive violence in executions and battle scenes, appears to be a strategy for the cultural reclamation of these local experiences. The story challenges the ingrained dualism between foreign, modern imperialist and nationalist forms of rationality, and pre-modern, local patterns of behaviour and thought. Employing polyphony and multivalent historical representtations, the novel aspires to portray the social dynamics in a given geohistorical circumstances by measuring the spatiotemporal as well as the cognitive distance between the witnessed event, the testifying witness and the future receivers of the transmitted stories. Thus, the inquiry does not focus on the historical events as facts, but rather on their cultural afterlife in (founding) narratives. In times of a growing gap between the modernist vision of human liberation and the actual conditions of growing inequality, delegitimization and dispossession, this tale of unrest in the wake of globalization has as much to say about the world's peoples around the year 2000, when the novel was published, as about the microcosm of Shandong Gaomi County around the year 1900, when the historical events took place. Taking into account that the novel was written as a local Maoqiang opera in the making and that theatres are major providers of cultural space for the enactment of the human self as the subject of history, Sandalwood Death can perhaps best be described as a theatre of reclamation.
Abstract To date, many studies have exhaustively explained how and why Yan Lianke deals with both the intimate relationship between disease and biopolitics and the relationship between utopia and dystopia. These are certainly the most important themes in Liven (2004) and Dream of Ding Village (2006). However, biopolitical discourses cannot fully account for the complexity, depth and humanity of these novels, which in addition to exploring the complex and protean meaning of life also represent shenshizhuyi, an expression coined by Yan Lianke to describe his human dilemma in representing the complex relationship between shen 神 (soul, spirit, mind and myths) and 实 (reality). This study aims to describe Yan Lianke’s notion of shenshizhuyi and contends that shenshizhuyi is not only a new mode of representation but also a biopolitical discourse whose origins are found in Franz Kafka’s writings, which describe and represent human nature and the human quandary as well as the process of reification of the subject. Yan Lianke’s achievements are equally important because they also describe human nature and the human quandary in a world that is gradually losing its identity.
Chinese Literature (Singapore: Asiapac, 2012); co-translated with Li En
In this volume, "Chinese Literature," you will meet great minds among the Chinese literates. Since reading is a form of pleasure that has been enjoyed for thousands of years, literature gives us the opportunity to meet great writers in Chinese history who have distilled their thoughts on life and society. This book will track the development of literature from the pre-Qin Dynasty era to the last monarchal regime, the Qing Dynasty.
I Find Support in Literature: An Interview with Yan Lianke
Chinese Literature Today, 2020
We spoke with the acclaimed Chinese novelist about his experience under quarantine, the worldwide spread anti-China sentiments, and the inspiration for his books. Yan Lianke told us from isolation in his apartment: 'If there had been more tolerance and freedom of expression, the scale of the epidemic would certainly not have been of this magnitude.' Yan Lianke Moratto: How are you experiencing these weeks of isolation because of the ongoing epidemic? I know you're busy writing a new novel. Yan: My family and I are doing pretty well. We've been locked in our house for the past 30 days (at the time of the interview). In all this time, I've only gone down to the ground floor three times, and I never left the compound we live in. And yet, the anxiety and anger are slowly fading. We're getting used even to this kind of life. We feel powerless. There's nothing else we can do. Little by little, we're trying to rationally reflect on this disaster that has hit China and the whole of humanity. This forced break has allowed me to focus on my new book. I hope to find help and support in literature.
Prism 17.2 (Oct 2020): 326–352., 2020
This ar ti cle ex am ines the prom ises and pre dic a ments of May Fourth writ ers in their ex per i men tal writ ing of the "long nov el" (changpian xiaoshuo 長篇小說) as a Chi nese brand of the mod ern ep ic. May Fourth in tel lec tu als showed a con scious ef fort to in sti tute a new brand of fic tional genre to en lighten the read ing pub lic. Yet their "ed u ca tion of the nov el" was far from com plete, as New Literature writ ers found fic tional ex pres sions pri mar ily in the form of the short sto ry, with strong un der tones of in di vid u al ism, sub jec tive lyr i cism, and elit ism. By fo cus ing on Mao Dun's 茅盾 (1896-1981) Ziye 子夜 (Midnight; 1933), the ar ti cle ex am ines his call for the es tab lish ment of the long novel and his stren u ous ef forts to "take over" the mod ern novel as an ideo log i cal form to nar rate a tel e o log i cal pro gres sion of his to ry. How do Mao Dun's fic tional nar ra tives il lu mi nate the rep re sen ta tional prob lems be tween fic tion, lo cal i ty, and mo der ni ty? For Mao Dun and his May Fourth contemporaries, mo der nity at large was expressed in a tel e o log i cal mode of time and prog ress, both in the rhet o ric of mo der nity and in fic tion writ ing. The ar ti cle re flects on Mao Dun's cre a tive and ideo log i cal im passe by teas ing out the nar ra tive loop holes of tra di tional voices and pop u lar fic tional reg is ters in the mod ern ep ic. KEYWORDS James Joyce, lyr i cal, Mao Dun, mod ern ep ic, mo der ni ty
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2021
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