published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1998. / Chair: Theodore Huters. Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation (PhD)--University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 2005.

This dissertation studies the writing of fiction in modern China from 1937 to 1949 in the three politically-divided areas: the Nationalist-controlled area, the Communist-dominated region, and the Japanese-occupied districts (before 1945), under the framework of “contested modernities” (the capitalist, the colonialist, and the socialist). Works of fiction here are explored as fundamentally cultural responses to the social, political, and historical experience. Therefore, it appreciates the dialectics of the content-form of these works as expressions, manifestations, and articulations of the contending modernities that competed against each other during that era. Methodologically, this project combines the application of the theory of “field of cultural production” promoted by Pierre Bourdieu, with the approach of historical/political hermeneutics as advocated by Fredric Jameson. The three areas set the stage for cultural productions of differing ideological tendencies. In this context, fiction is a testing ground for various versions and visions of “new cultures” of Chinese modernities. Here, we treat “1940s China” as a social-cultural space and “fiction” as a literary and intellectual institution in which various visions of “new cultures” expressed themselves. “Style” or “form” then becomes a socially symbolic, political action in which writers’ search for social and symbolic certainty was incarnated. Part I, “Negotiating with the Nightmarish Modern,” explores writers from the Japanese-occupied areas. The first chapter studies the relationship between the experience of exile and Xiao Hong’s war-time diasporic literature. The second chapter explores the middle-brow boudoir literature from Shanghai. In particular, it studies the works by Zhang Ailing. Part II, “Rethinking the Disjointed Modern,” investigates the Nationalist-controlled regions. The so-called “neo-romanticist” writers Wumingshi and Xu Xu, as well as the famed writer of the “July School” Lu Ling, are its objects of study. The third part, “Contending for a New Modern,” takes as its object of research writings from the Communist-controlled area. It looks into the “peasant writer” Zhao Shuli’s stories and the works by the May-Fourth-writer-turned-Communist-intellectual, Ding Ling. The study not only substantiates the argument that in modern China, the search for a new subjectivity was undertaken through conquering the identity crisis of the “new man” and “new woman,” but also testifies to the fact that this “control of the form” was simultaneously a symbolic action that articulated the anxiety of the intellectuals about becoming a new, modern Chinese. Put in other way, this search for a new identity is premised upon the establishment of a new subjectivity, which was an integral part of the project of building various “new cultures.” Through a practice of political hermeneutics of fictional texts and social-historical subtexts, this dissertation shows that social modernity and literary modernity intertwined and interacted with each other in the development of modern Chinese literature / text

Between the founding of the Republic in 1912 and the 1937 outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, an unprecedented pooling of cultural, technological, and financial resources centered around a concept of authorship as the work of a modern, individuated creator. The emergent figure of the author, as a new centerpiece in the reception of both traditional vernacular fiction and New Literature alike, was first and foremost an unfolding literary event throughout the 1920s, which simultaneously gained enough social and institutional traction to quickly spread across various other fields of cultural production by the late 1930s. However, despite its status as a historical construct, the author-centered model of interpretation and analysis remains the least interrogated and historicized assumption in the scholarship and pedagogy of modern Chinese literature. In approaching this problem, I propose “fictions of authorship” as a conceptual framework to account for the different domains of cultural formation in which discourses of authorship obtained relevance in early 20th century China. Additionally, the framework is also useful for registering different historical moments of author-making. The most recent of such moments, and the object of study in this dissertation, can be characterized by major shifts within lateral and hierarchical organizations of textual labors from the late Qing onwards. Moreover, this particular episode of the modern author articulates a critical redistribution of symbolic power amongst appearing (and disappearing) literary agents, from which authorship emerged as the most authoritative form of creative labor. Fabulations of the modern author was as much about ushering in new concepts and practices of literature as it was about the death of traditional literati institutions and modes of knowledge production. Beginning with the introduction of modern punctuation initiated in 1916, the erasure of fiction commentary from canonical vernacular novels throughout the subsequent decade, followed by the New Literatures of 1920s and early 1930s, this dissertation traces the emergence of the author through developments in theories of reading and literary criticism, the temporal structures of paratextual practice, discourses of creativity and writing, and legal codifications of copyright. I argue that the notion of individuated authorship competed with other collaborative or collective forms of textual labor—if not in actual practice, then certainly in their institutional articulations and the professionalization of various textual roles. Taken together, these historical processes of negotiation and reorganization manifest a “fiction of authorship” that illuminates both productive and constraining dimensions of the literary reform agenda in China’s struggle for nationhood during the early 20th century.

As one of the largest non-English speaking groups in Australia, Chinese immigrants, refugees and sojourners are becoming more visible and have begun to exert more influence on Australian society. These groups can be better understood by reading and analysing Chinese literature in Australia because these contemporary Chinese literary works discuss a numbers of issues, such as how migrants and refugees adapted to the host culture while preserving their traditional culture; how they became involved into the new society and became a part of it; and what anxieties and difficulties they encountered in the process of displacement and transition. The current study uses the theories of both cultural studies and inter-cultural communication theorists to examine literary works written in Chinese by Chinese immigrants to Australia. Literary theory is also used as a methodological tool to analyse the writings. The study compares the works of writers from mainland China with the writings of Chinese from other country ('Chinese outsiders'). Although the two groups write on similar themes, the research shows that the characteristics, and the general perspectives they present are quite different from one another.

This dissertation looks beyond the prevailing view of Pu Songling’s (1640-1715) Liaozhai zhiyi as an undisputed classic of Chinese literature, positing that much of the work’s cultural relevance and popular appeal derives from its status as “minor discourse” rooted in the tradition of the ghost tale. The first half of the dissertation examines the ghosts depicted within Liaozhai, reconnecting their tamed and feminized images with their dark and anarchic origins. The second half studies the reception of Liaozhai, chronicling the book’s cultural ascension from xiaoshuo, in the original sense of a minor form of discourse fraught with generic and ideological tensions, to a major work of fiction (xiaoshuo in its modern sense). However, the book’s canonical status remains unsettled, haunted by its heterogeneous literary and cultural roots. The Introduction reviews current scholarship on Liaozhai, justifying the need to further investigate the relationship between popular perceptions of Liaozhai and the Chinese notion of ghosts. Chapter One delineates Pu Songling’s position in late imperial ghost discourse and examines how the ghost tale reflects his ambivalence toward being a Confucian literatus. Chapter Two reads Pu Songling’s “The Painted Skin” in conjunction with its literary antecedents, demonstrating that Pu’s uses of both zhiguai and chuanqi modes are essential for the exploration of the ghost’s critical and creative potential. Chapter Three takes up the issues of genre, canon and ideology in the “remaking” of the book by Qing dynasty critics, publishers and commentators, a process in which Liaozhai gains prestige but Liaozhai ghosts become aestheticized into objects of connoisseurship. Chapter Four looks at the ruptures in modern ghost discourse that paradoxically create new vantage points from which Liaozhai regains its “minor” status, most notably in Hong Kong ghost films. The Conclusion revisits “The Painted Skin,” a Liaozhai story that exemplifies the complex cultural ramifications of the ghost. The dissertation combines a study of Liaozhai’s textual formation and its subsequent history of reception with a dialogic inquiry into the ghost, which occupies a highly contested field of cultural discourse, functioning variously as a psychological projection, a token of belief, a literary motif and an aesthetic construction.

This dissertation looks beyond the prevailing view of Pu Songling’s (1640-1715) Liaozhai zhiyi as an undisputed classic of Chinese literature, positing that much of the work’s cultural relevance and popular appeal derives from its status as “minor discourse” rooted in the tradition of the ghost tale. The first half of the dissertation examines the ghosts depicted within Liaozhai, reconnecting their tamed and feminized images with their dark and anarchic origins. The second half studies the reception of Liaozhai, chronicling the book’s cultural ascension from xiaoshuo, in the original sense of a minor form of discourse fraught with generic and ideological tensions, to a major work of fiction (xiaoshuo in its modern sense). However, the book’s canonical status remains unsettled, haunted by its heterogeneous literary and cultural roots. The Introduction reviews current scholarship on Liaozhai, justifying the need to further investigate the relationship between popular perceptions of Liaozhai and the Chinese notion of ghosts. Chapter One delineates Pu Songling’s position in late imperial ghost discourse and examines how the ghost tale reflects his ambivalence toward being a Confucian literatus. Chapter Two reads Pu Songling’s “The Painted Skin” in conjunction with its literary antecedents, demonstrating that Pu’s uses of both zhiguai and chuanqi modes are essential for the exploration of the ghost’s critical and creative potential. Chapter Three takes up the issues of genre, canon and ideology in the “remaking” of the book by Qing dynasty critics, publishers and commentators, a process in which Liaozhai gains prestige but Liaozhai ghosts become aestheticized into objects of connoisseurship. Chapter Four looks at the ruptures in modern ghost discourse that paradoxically create new vantage points from which Liaozhai regains its “minor” status, most notably in Hong Kong ghost films. The Conclusion revisits “The Painted Skin,” a Liaozhai story that exemplifies the complex cultural ramifications of the ghost. The dissertation combines a study of Liaozhai’s textual formation and its subsequent history of reception with a dialogic inquiry into the ghost, which occupies a highly contested field of cultural discourse, functioning variously as a psychological projection, a token of belief, a literary motif and an aesthetic construction.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-215).

Thesis--Columbia University. / 147 L. Bibliography: l. 137-139.