Experimental Chinese Literature

Experimental Chinese Literature is the first theoretical account of material poetics from the dual perspectives of translation and technology. Focusing on a range of works by contemporary Chinese authors including Hsia Yü, Chen Li, and Xu Bing, Tong King Lee explores how experimental writers engage their readers in multimodal reading experiences by turning translation into a method and by exploiting various technologies. The key innovation of this book rests with its conceptualisation of translation and technology as spectrums that interact in different ways to create sensuous, embodied texts. Drawing on a broad range of fields such as literary criticism, multimodal studies, and translation, Tong King Lee advances the notion of the translational text, which features transculturality and intersemioticity in its production and reception.

This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.

Written from a feminist perspective, this is a cultural and ideological study of modern China as seen in the writing of experimental fiction, one of the main attempts to subvert the conventions of socialist realism in contemporary Chinese literature.

Language Shattered is both a history of poetry from the People's Republic of China and a case study of the oeuvre of a leading Chinese poet. After the stifling orthodoxy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the terror of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought official Chinese literature to a total standstill. At the same time, disillusioned youths were more or less accidentally exposed to a varied body of foreign literature and began writing underground poetry. In the 1980s this poetry scene, now above ground, became one of pluriformity and proliferation in both official and unofficial circuits. The brutal suppression of the 1989 Protest Movement gave it an exile offshoot. The historical overview in Part I of this book is complemented in Part II by a discussion of Duoduo's poetry. Duoduo's career as a poet reflects the vicissitudes of Chinese Experimental poetry - and his beautiful, headstrong poems merit attention in themselves. They show that Chinese poetry is not just of interest as a chronicle of Chinese politics, but as literature in its own right.

China’s literary and cultural production at the turn of the twenty-first century is marked by heterogeneity, plurality, and diversity. Given its complexity, the literary/cultural production of this period perhaps can be understood most productively as a response to a global modernity that has touched and transformed all aspects of contemporary Chinese reality. The eleven essays in this book offer an introduction to some of the most important works published at the turn of the twenty-first century. In combining textual analysis of specific works with theoretical insights, and in locating the texts in their sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts, the essays explore key theoretical issues and intellectual concerns of the time. They collectively draw a broad contour of new developments, major trends, and radical changes, capturing the intellectual and cultural Zeitgeist of the age. All in all, these essays offer new theoretical approaches to, and critical perspectives on, contemporary Chinese literature and culture.

Wu Hung, a leading expert on ancient and contemporary Chinese art, has identified three critical aspects of current artistic production in China - demystification, ruins, and transience.

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. The volume opens with thematic essays on the politics and ethics of writing literary history, the formation of the canon, the relationship between language and form, the role of literary institutions and communities, the effects of censorship, the representation of the Chinese diaspora, the rise and meaning of Sinophone literature, and the role of different media in the development of literature. Subsequent essays focus on authors, their works, and the schools with which they were aligned, featuring key names, titles, and terms in English and in Chinese characters. Woven throughout are pieces on late Qing fiction, popular entertainment fiction, martial arts fiction, experimental theater, post-Mao avant-garde poetry, post–martial law fiction from Taiwan, contemporary genre fiction from China, and recent Internet literature. The volume includes essays on such authors as Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, Jin Yong, Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Gao Xingjian, and Yan Lianke. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern literature in the Chinese-speaking world.

This book brings together fresh research from experts on contemporary Chinese poetry, built upon one of the most glorious poetic traditions of any civilization in the world yet historically neglected by scholars in English. This comprehensive volume offers readable and provocative treatments of many of the most important Chinese poets of our age.

Chinese prose poetry today is engaged with a series of questions that are fundamental to the modern Chinese language: What is prose? What is it good for? How should it look and sound? Millions of Chinese readers encounter prose poetry every year, both in the most official of state-sponsored magazines and in the unorthodox, experimental work of the avant-garde. Recite and Refuse makes the answers to our questions about prose legible by translating, surveying, and interpreting prose poems, and by studying the people, politics, and contexts that surround the writing of prose poetry. Author Nick Admussen argues that unlike most genres, Chinese prose poems lack a distinct size or shape. Their similarity to other prose is the result of a distinct process in which a prose form is recited with some kind of meaningful difference—an imitation that refuses to fully resemble its source. This makes prose poetry a protean, ever-changing group of works, channeling the language of science, journalism, Communist Party politics, advertisements, and much more. The poems look vastly different as products, but are made with a similar process. Focusing on the composition process allows Admussen to rewrite the standard history of prose poetry, finding its origins not in 1918 but in the obedient socialist prose poetry of the 1950s. Recite and Refuse places the work of state-sponsored writers in mutual relationship to prose poems by unorthodox and avant-garde poets, from cadre writers like Ke Lan and Guo Feng to the border-crossing intellectual and poet Liu Zaifu to experimental artists such as Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. The volume features never-before seen English translations that range from the representative to the exceptional, culminating with Ouyang Jianghe’s masterpiece “Hanging Coffin.” Reading across the spectrum enables us to see the way that artists interact with each other, how they compete and cooperate, and how their interactions, as well as their creations, continuously reinvent both poetry and prose.

This book offers a case study of four of the most influential contemporary Chinese writers and 'cultural bastards' - Duoduo, an underground 'misty' poet; Wang Shuo, a 'hooligan' writer; Zhang Chengzhi, an old 'Red Guard' and new 'cultural heretic'; and Wang Xiaobo, a chronicler of Rabelaisian modern history.