Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese
Literature and Language Journals 13 issues, 71 articles
PEER-REVIEWED PERIODICAL
Peer-reviewed publications on Questia are publications containing articles which were subject to evaluation for accuracy and substance by professional peers of the article's author(s).
Articles
Vol. 14, No. 1, Summer
Homeless in the World: War, Narrative, and Historical Consciousness in Eileen Chang, Gyorgy Lukacs, and Lev Tolstoy
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Modern literature's treatment of war reveals a doubled conception of the world. On one hand, war's violence gives witness to a world consuming itself as it lurches ever more closely to oblivion; on the other, the migrations induced by war may unexpectedly...
Old Tales, Untold: Lu Xun against World Literature
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World literature has smiled on Lu Xun [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. He stands, if not as the foremost, then as a major representative of modern Chinese literature in anthologies. Though anthologies are not the ultimate arbiters of literary worldliness,...
Translation in Distraction: On Eileen Chang's "Chinese Translation: A Vehicle of Cultural Influence"
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Miss Eileen Chang [...] is a Chinese who, in contrast to most of her countrymen, does not simply take China for granted. It is her deep curiosity about her own people which enables her to interpret the Chinese to the foreigner. ...
The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Vernacular Happiness
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Mandarins, Bohemians, and Plebeians At the beginning of Carma Hinton's classic documentary (1984) about gender relations in Chinese society, a male voice explains, over the image of a pair of ruddy-cheeked little boy and girl munching on snacks...
The Migrant Voice: The Politics of Writing Home between the Sinophone and Anglophone Worlds
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The Politics of Writing Home What is the meaning of writing "home"--the production of place in literature--in the contemporary transnational literary phenomenon? How is the sense of dwelling "at home in the world" connected to the historically diasporic...
A Critical Review of Japanese Scholarship on Modern Chinese Fiction and Translation Studies
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Introduction In a short article entitled "Discussing the Inadequacy of Eliminating the Classical Language" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the well-known translator Lin Shu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1917) criticizes the shift from literature...
The Translated Identities of Chinese Minority Writers: Sinophone Naxi Authors
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[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Ssee ggv loq jjuq chee kaf seil, ngeq chee ngeq me waq seiq, tei ee zziuq la tei ee zziuq me waq seiq, nge gge ggu mu gv gge sai chee hoq chee bberq dal bberq neiq seiq...
Vol. 13, No. 1-2, Summer
Disillusionment with Chinese Culture in the 1880s: Wang Tao's Three Classical Tales
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Leading scholars of modern Chinese literature have long discussed how the May Fourth became a hegemonic force and have sought to uncover the "burdens of May Fourth"; that is, those discourses eclipsed by the May Fourth intellectuals as they promoted...
Madness in Southern China: Illness as Metaphor in Su Tong's the Tale of the Siskins and "Madwoman on the Bridge"
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I. Introduction Su Tong [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1963-) has been tirelessly and diligently telling stories about southern China. Two fictional streets located in a fictional city in southern China, namely Mahogany Street and Maple-Poplar...
Sinophone Studies and Beyond: An Interview with Shu-Mei Shih
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Conducted by SHAN Te-hsing Time: November 22, 2014 Place: Gold Coast Hotel, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong SHAN: Professor Shih, it's nice to meet you here. You come from the U.S. and I come from Taiwan; here we meet in Hong Kong to discuss things of...
Transculturating the Modern: Zhang Ruogu's Literary Life in 1930s Shanghai
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"Go to Paris! Go to Paris!" Zhang Ruogu, 1936 (1) Shanghai has been known as "the Paris of the East" since the beginning of the last century because of its exciting nightlife, cosmopolitan atmosphere and splendid urban landscape. However, in...
Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter
Foreword
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Local communities know many ghosts who are remembered in different forms, temporalities and intensities. Similarly, world history breeds its own monsters, among whom some are more intrusive in the realm of the living and extensive in their spatial...
Ghost Talk in 1936: "Living Ghosts" and "Real Ghosts" in Republican-Era Literary Discourse and the Two Analects Fortnightly Ghost-Story Special Issues
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1. Introduction (1) In one of Shao Xunmei's (1906-1968) early poems, the later to-be editor of the popular humour magazine Analects Fortnightly [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (hereafter referred to as Analects), described Shanghai as a city of...
Thai Horror Film: Ghosts, Archives of History/ies, "Real Life," and Collective Trauma
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[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Introduction Contemporary historians make a clear distinction between history and the past. For Keith Jenkins, the past are the events that have already occurred, are finished, and can only be brought back in...
Haunted Time, Still Photography and Cinema as Memory: The Dream Sequence in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
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[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Introduction After being awarded the 2010 Palme d'Or at Cannes for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2009), Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul ended his acceptance speech by thanking "all the ghosts...
Haunting Gaps: Gender, Modernity, Film and the Ghosts of Yotsuya Kaidan
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[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Introduction Ghosts are a powerful metaphor. They stand for an Other that is perceived as threatening; for the unclear, the unspeakable; for a present absence that demands justice or at least answer, and that...
A Ghost Tour in Rouge
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[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Introduction The relentless development of a city "kills" its past, and "buries" its dark side; yet its past can never be entirely "exorcised." There are many ghost tours/walks in modern cities leading contemporary...
Beyond Gothic: Ye Si's Spectral Hong Kong and the Global Culture Crisis
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[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Introduction "The Gothic originated in the transition from feudal economies based on land ownership and patrilineal property rights to bourgeois capitalism, registering in its phantasmagoria the medieval affects...
Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring
The Title of Yecao
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The essays that follow show how much there is to know about Lu Xun's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] collection Yecao [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. They interweave complex historical, biographical, theoretical, philosophical, aesthetic and formal...
Dreaming as Representation: Wild Grass and Realism's Responsibility
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Lu Xun's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] art teaches us about the relationship between social bodies and the literary forms that seek to capture them. He exhibited a remarkable ability to depict the throes of human suffering with a combination of...
Intractable Paradox: Revisionism in the Chinese Reception of Wild Grass
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The study of Lu Xun's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1881-1936) Wild Grass [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1927) will always be a study in revisionism. Since the publication of Feng Xuefeng's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1903-1976) article...
Lu Xun's Wild Grass: Autobiographical Moments of the Creative Self
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Lu Xun [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1881-1936) has generated a vast body of academic research that continues unabated in China and internationally. His short story "Diary of a Madman" (1918) instantly transformed him into a celebrity and the hero...
The Poetics of Hinting in Wild Grass
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Introduction: "Such a Fighter" Lu Xun's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1881-1936) prose poem "Such a Fighter," [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] from Wild Grass [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], invents a warrior who reacts to all encounters with...
Vol. 11, No. 1, Summer
Foreword
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This special issue of the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese (JMLC) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] features a series of articles selected from a conference on "Cultural Transformation in the 1950s: From Mainland China to Hong Kong" "[TEXT NOT...
Transition and Transformation: With Special Reference to the Translation Practice of Eileen Chang in the 1950s Hong Kong
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Introduction The 1950s were a period of hostility between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) when the two countries were at loggerheads over ideological issues, and during the early part of the decade, there was the Korean...
Translating Poetic Modernity: Zhou Zuoren's Interest in Modern Japanese Poetry
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On April 24, 1935, a short obituary entitled "Yosano xiansheng jinian" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("In Memory of Mr. Yosano") appeared in the popular Tianjin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] newspaper Yishibao [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]...
Vol. 10, No. 2, December
Editor's Note
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The Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) of Lingnan University, furthering its studies on Hong Kong literature, launched a project in 2009 to compile a bibliography of existing translations of literary works by Hong Kong writers, as an extension of...
Bizarre Circuses, Barbaric Costumes: Hong Kong and the Aspirations of Translation
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Note: This is a heavily abbreviated version of an informal presentation given at the one-day symposium "Translating Hong Kong," held at the Hong Kong Central Library, on Sunday 19 June 2011. My intention was to illustrate, through pictures and anecdotes,...
Omens of History: Su Tong's Southern Landscape and Dynastic Histories
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Born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province in 1963, Su Tong [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] belongs to the post-Mao generation of writers whose experimental spirit in creating "new languages and literary forms in order to provide new meanings for society" (1)...
Foreword
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This present special issue differs from the past issues of JMLC in that most of its articles, if not all, carry a strong translation component. It is no exaggeration to say that they are works of translation studies as much as literary studies. ...
Legibility vs. the Fullness of Expression: Rethinking the Transformation of Modern Chinese Prose
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There has been a vertiginous instability to modern Chinese writing and literature, something most often attributed either to the growing pains of a natural process of linguistic evolution from classical to vernacular or to various sorts of political...
Taking Hope to China: An Example of Late-Qing Translation
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Since its publication in 1894, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] has been popular with generations of young readers in Britain. In 1912 the novel was translated into Chinese and published in installments in Xiaoshuo...
No True Men in the State: Pseudo/translation and "Feminine" Voice in the Late-Qing
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Introduction Side by side with landmark works of literature, philosophy, and political thought, the early 20th-century Chinese print and news business provided its readers with a world of questionable goods. Of course, forgeries, unauthorized reprints,...
Vol. 10, No. 1, Summer
Ambivalent Laughter: Comic Sketches in CCTV's "Spring Festival Eve Gala"
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the years since Zhongyang dianshitai chunjie lianhuan wanhui [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (The China Central Television's Spring Festival Eve Gala Performance) began in 1983, it has gradually evolved as part of China's...
Heartburn on a Map Called Home: Yau Ching and the (Im)possibility of Hong Kong Poetry as Chinese Poetry
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] --What is your nationality? some people will ask, because to them all this sounds very strange. And you say: Well, well, as for nationality... You look at your C.I. over and over again, and discover that you have no nationality,...
Liu Yichang and the Temporalities of Capitalist Modernity
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Liu Yichang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] has been generally considered as one of the most significant figures in modern literature of Hong Kong, and his fictions have often been praised for their innovative techniques...
Center and Periphery in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: An Introduction
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The past three decades have seen unprecedented economic growth, social reformation, and increased political clout for China and Chinese communities. In spite of the fact that it manifests a strong central government, tightly controlled media apparatus,...
Couching Race in the Global Era: Intra-Asian Racism in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Widely and often wildly praised by international audiences and film critics, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (dir. Ang Lee TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 2000; hereafter also referred to as...
Centering and Decentering Methodologies: Wang Anyi's Migratory Mythology and Descriptive Historiography
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If center and periphery refer to geographical locations or places, they must be formations of dislocation or displacement in the first place; if they are political positions of power, they are subject to reposition. The two...
Migrants in a Strange City: (Dis-)Locating the China Imaginary in Post-1997 Hong Kong Films
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Since the earliest days of Hong Kong cinema, 'China" has been a material, cultural, and ideological presence. The local film industry's long history of collaboration with its mainland counterparts in Shanghai in the first...
Traditional Culture and Contemporary Performance: Adaw Palaf's the Great Flood
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As the articles in this issue demonstrate, literature in its various forms is an important medium of communication between the center, the dominant or mainstream culture, and the periphery, culturally and politically marginalized...
Vol. 9, No. 2, July
The Provocation of Dim Sum; or, Making Diaspora Visible on Film
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Affect of Pastness in Globalist Geo-Temporal Politics For a long time while living in the United States, I was not fond of visiting the urban sectors commonly known as Chinatowns, where people go for inexpensive Chinese...
People's Literature and the Construction of a New Chinese Literary Tradition
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Communist Party's victory in the civil war and the establishment of the People's Republic of China signaled for many authors and critics triumph in debates over the nature of art and literature that had been raging in...
The Taming of the Youth: Discourse, Politics, and Fictional Representation in the Early PRC
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This essay is a study of the cultural manifestation of youth in the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It does not aim to examine the focus on youth merely as a social phenomenon, but instead considers youth...
Home and the Land: The "Native" Fiction of Zhong Lihe
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Introduction Zhong Lihe [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1915-60) is arguably Taiwan's most important native writer of the early post-Japanese period. His position on the margins of Chinese culture was determined by his...
Vol. 8, No. 2, December
Hong Kong Literature as Sinophone Literature
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A denotative meaning of the term "Sinophone," as used by Sau-ling Wong in her work on Sinophone Chinese American literature to designate Chinese American literature written in Sinitic languages, is a productive way to start...
Vol. 8, No. 1, January
Foreword
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The present collection is an offshoot from a symposium on King Hu's cinema, held at Lingnan University, in mid-November 2004, under the auspices of its Centre for Humanities Research. It contains articles on various aspects of King Hu's works, and...
Come Drink with Me-If You Dare: Golden Swallow, King Hu, and the Cold War
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A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act...
King Hu's Filmography
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1950s Title (Production Company) Year of Post Release Aren't the Kids Lovely? (Great Wall) 1953 Props Festival Moon (Feng Huang) 1953 Decoration, ...
Form and Content: King Hu's Raining in the Mountain as Stylization and Allegory
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Raining in the Mountain ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 1979) was King Hu's ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) continued effort in delving into Buddhist subject matters, since A Touch of Zen 1970/72). Compared with the...
History, Nation and Politics in King Hu's Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch of Zen
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Introduction King Hu's wuxia films are steeped in history, but it is not generally acknowledged that his films deal with politics and the concept of the nation. In fact, the historicism of the genre presupposes a close...
Vol. 7, No. 2, December
The Rise and Fall of Taipei Cinema League: Film Revolution in 1930's Modern City
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I Modernity in 1931 The Taiwan Daily News, the largest circulation newspaper during the 1930s, provides us with a view of daily life in Taipei from various perspectives. For example, in an interview (8 October 1931), Nishino Keinosuke, the CEO of...
The Gendering of Modernity: The Colonial Body in Japanese and Taiwanese Literature
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I Introduction; Postcolonial Refractions on Cross-Strait Cultural Contacts The February 2004 issue of the prestigious Japanese literary journal Shincho (1) presented a special section focusing on literary exchanges between Taiwan and Japan. (2)...
Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment
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Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0674002148 (Paperback). While both academic and popular writing on Hong Kong cinema has proliferated in...
Liu, Lydia H., Ed. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations
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Liu, Lydia H., ed. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0822324245 (Paperback). ISBN: 0822324016 (Cloth). Cross-cultural studies have been in a bind since the...
Lu, Sheldon H. China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity
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Lu, Sheldon H. China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0804742049 (Paperback). ISBN: 0804738963 (Cloth). The pervasive economical, social and cultural transformations of China...
Vol. 6, No. 2, June
Modern Literature in Chinese in a Global Context
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JTMLC is a journal devoted to the study of modern literature in Chinese. Over the past hundred years since its emergence at the turn of the century, modern Chinese literature has attracted a large readership. Not only is it widely studied, but it is...
On J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2003
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John Maxwell (Michael) Coetzee, who won the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2003, was born in 1940 in Cape Town. His background is both German and English. His parents sent him to an English school and he grew up using English as his first language....
Intersections: A Translator's Thoughts on Hong Kong Literature
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For the topic of the conference "Modern Chinese Literature in a Global Context," I have made the choice not to investigate contents and themes directly, but to consider linguistic expression in the literature of Hong Kong. In my view, language includes...
Time, Place, and Books in Ha Jin's Waiting
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How do we read Ha Jin's novel Waiting (1) as Anglophone Chinese literature? Although this novel has won several awards given by major American literary organizations as well as the Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York, it is a unique entity...
The Myth of "Chinese" Literature: Ha Jin and the Globalization of "National" Literary Writing
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What does it mean to speak of a "world literature" in the context of modern Chinese literary studies? Does it refer to the Chinese literature translated into a relatively global language, circulated and read worldwide? Does it actually denote the world...
Whose Nation? Ethnographic Enquiry in Cultural Discourses of Belonging since the 80s
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Tibet, in Zhaxi Dawa's hands, permanently defies all hermeneutic efforts, because it is an endless enigma, an eternal mystery. Wang Fei (1) The Spectre of Minority Discourse Concepts of culture, in our contemporary globalizing world, very...
The Poet as Mad Genius: Between Stereotype and Archetype
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... he knew How to make madness beauty ... --George Gordon Byron A poet is someone who's been struck by lightning at least once. A great poet has been struck about seventeen times. --Seamus Heaney ... at the secret heart of madness...we...
Vol. 6, No. 1, January
The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity
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The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Poshek FU and David DESSER, eds. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. xi, 333 pp. ISBN 0521776023 (paperback). ISBN 0521772354 (cloth). At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World....
New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations
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New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations. By Sheila Cornelius. London: Wallflower Press, 2002, 144 pp. Paperback ISBN: 1903364132. Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua. Tani E. Barlow and Jing...
Editor's Foreword
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The greatest reward for me as a teacher is reading poetry with young people. With the exception of literature and creative writing majors--in themselves a tiny minority at universities--few American undergraduates read poetry these days. Most of the...
The Born-Again Forest: A Preliminary Chapter in the Post-Misty Development of Avant-Garde Poetry in China
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It comes as something of a surprise how little has been publicly said in China or elsewhere about the Born-Again Forest (Cisheng lin), the earliest of Sichuan's privately produced poetry journals (April, 1982; henceforth to be referred to as Born-Again)....
A Night of Their Own: Gender Identity in Women's Poetry after Mao
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I will ask night to create another sun. Hot. Wang Xiaoni In the contemporary People's Republic of China, blackness and darkness are most striking textual markers of female-authored poetry. It is as well a unanimously recognised yardstick in the...
Rhythm, Sound and Sense: Narrativity in Sun Wenbo
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Introduction Sun Wenbo was born in Chengdu in 1956, (2) and has lived in Beijing since the mid-1990s. After three years of secondary education, three years of forced rustication in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and jobs as a car...
Beyond Binaries: Rereading Yang Lian's "Norlang" and "Banpo"
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This article reconsiders two important texts from the first half of the 1980s by the Chinese poet Yang Lian. The first of these is "Nuorilang" (Norlang). The second is "Banpo". "Norlang" and "Banpo" have played important roles in the interpretation...
Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries
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Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries. By Liu Kang. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. xvi, 230 pp. Cloth ISBN 0822324253, US$59.95. Paper ISBN 0822324482, US$19.95. In 1993 Liu Kang published...