MCLC: Chinese Literature Today 2.2

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Stalling, Jonathan C. <stalling at ou.edu>
Subject: Chinese Literature Today 2.2
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Dear MCLC readers,

The newest issue of CLT is now available in print and in digital versions
(see www.chineseliteraturetoday.com). I would like to take a moment to
describe the content in more detail for MCLC readers, as I think you'll
find this issue very interesting.

Featured Writer: Yi Sha

To call the work of this issue’s featured writer, Yi Sha, controversial
would not capture the scale of his polemical poetics and radical public
image. Here introduced by Heather Inwood, Assistant Professor of Chinese
Lit at Ohio State (who also translated the section), and the Chinese
literary critic Tang Xin, MCLC readers will gain a greater appreciation of
the often-polarizing issues of the contemporary Chinese poetry world
through the work of one of China’s most outspoken literary figures.  As
one of the most influential proponents of the so-called lower body school,
Yi Sha raised the stakes for Chinese poets by fundamentally questioning
the value of poetry in modern China and the role poets play in addressing
the full breadth of contemporary lived experience. Readers of CLT may
recall earlier essays on so-called body writing (shenti xiezuo) that
explore novels like Wei Hui’s “Shanghai Baby” and Mian Mian’s “Candy,”
which do not shy away from the lower body topics of casual sex and related
hot-button issues of drug use. As a representative of lower-body poets,
however, Yi Sha’s work has further transformed these ideas into a poetics
that not only enriches poetic diction with heretofore taboo language and
topics, but also refocuses the lyric upon the forgotten lives of common
people—like small-time criminals who briefly appear in the peripheral
vision of media attention in poems like “China’s Lower Rungs”—and the
subtle dignity and defiance of those who live totally outside the public
eye—a street vendor in “The Old Newspaper Seller,” and a nanny in “Zhang
Changshi, Your Nanny.” Here, the shift from meditation on abstract,
intellectual concerns to the gritty textures of society’s “lower-body” not
only captures a political call to witness the full spectrum of life in
modern China, but connects these lives to a fertility capable of rebirth.
It is important to note, however, that much of his poetry explores these
issues through a relentless yet forgiving self-critique. In poems like
“9/11 Psychological Report,” Yi Sha makes himself into an aperture through
which readers can glimpse the moral ambivalence and compromise that
characterize both the “I” of modern poetry and the nation as a whole
during a time of moral and existential uncertainty.

Contemporary Chinese Fiction and a Special Section on Translation

This issue also features a collection of literary essays, stories, and
talks by many of China’s most well-known novelists, with topics that range
from the historically rich relationship between animals and Chinese
fiction (Zhang Wei), the deep bonds that connect people with their books
(Fan Xiaoqing), to a compelling call for new forms of fiction (Li Er). In
an effort to bring greater attention to the often under-acknowledged
importance of translation, we have solicited essays from three highly
regarded translators. In his essay “Translating the Impossible,” Shu
Cai—one of China’s most respected literary translators of French
poetry—explores the paradoxical truth that every translator of poetry must
eventually face: translation is simply not possible and yet totally
necessary and worth pursuing against all evidence to the contrary.
Crossing the Pacific to the Bay Area, we asked Andrea Lingenfelter, a well
known translator of contemporary Chinese fiction and poetry, to discuss
the intersection of gender and translation from a practitioner’s
perspective. Finally, crossing over to the East Coast, we find an essay by
Carlos Rojas, a translator and Associate Professor of Chinese Literature
at Duke University, that explores translation not only in terms of
transmitting information between languages, but between different dialects
in China through the etymological imagination of the novelist Han Shaogong.

A Gallery of Contemporary Chinese Poetry

In continuation of the themes of translation and international
connections, the gallery of poems in this issue features three
cosmopolitan poets who write in Chinese but have deep ties to other
languages and places: the aforementioned translator-poet Shu Cai, the late
Zhang Zao—a Chinese poet based in Germany who was well known for his
attempts to fuse Chinese and Western poetic and linguistic
sensibilities—and Huang Guangxin—a key figure in Singapore’s literary
world. Also noteworthy are the translators of these poets, who are all
poets themselves: Jami Proctor-Xu, Eleanor Goodman, Wang Ao, and Steven
Bradbury.  

China’s Ethnic Minority Poetry and Poetics

CLT is also excited to highlight the extremely rich and varied poetry of
China’s ethnic minorities. In this issue, Mark Bender, an Associate
Professor at Ohio State specializing in traditional Han (Chinese) and
ethnic minority performance-oriented literature, explores the incredibly
diverse and lively poetry world(s) thriving in the ethnic minority
communities of southwest China and beyond.  Yunnan Province alone has
approximately 25 official ethnic groups, including Yi, Wa, Hani, Dai,
Jingpo, and Zhuang. Bender’s essay “Cry of the Silver Pheasant” acquaints
readers with poetry from these groups, paying special attention to the
Liangshan School of Nuosu Yi Poets based in Sichuan. Denis Mair, a
translator and regular contributor to CLT, contributed further to this
focus when he traveled to the hometown of the section’s featured poet,
Jidi Majia.  Mair's essay on Jidi Majia offers another glimpse into yet
another lineage of Yi Nuosu poetry and poetics to reveal the incredible
depth and variety within a single minority tradition.

Featured Scholar: Yue Daiyun

Like CLT’s earlier featured scholars and translators—David Der-wei Wang,
Michelle Yeh, and Howard Goldblatt—this issue’s featured scholar, Yue
Daiyun, has left a tremendous mark on the study of Chinese literature, but
this time in China. While some MCLC readers may know of Yue’s high-profile
and tumultuous early life through her popular 1987 English-language
autobiography To the Storm, many may not know about her later
contributions to the establishment of comparative literature as a major
field of study in China. Perhaps most striking about Yue’s later career is
the wider global context of the impact she has had through her work with
thriving comparative literature organizations, degree-granting programs,
literary journals, and generations of students. During the last twenty
years of her career, many leading Western literary critics predicted the
demise of comparative literature as a discipline, citing the shift to the
pervasive interdisciplinarity of postcolonial globalized cultural studies.

Yue, however, like other Chinese comparativists, argues that Chinese
intellectuals have inherited an intercultural way of thinking that is
grounded in both Western intellectual traditions and traditional Chinese
discourses (such as the three teachings: Confucianism, Daoism, and
Buddhism), and that neither mode of thinking now exists independent of the
other. According to Yue, this intercultural inheritance naturally
positions Chinese literary scholars to produce ways of readings not
previously available within what Yue calls the first and second phases of
comparative literature (the first being its formation within Europe, and
the latter being the shift to American academic dominance).

Not only is cultural difference elevated to a new, far more important
status in Yue’s work, but the divisions she creates are cleaved so far
down the middle that the very word “culture” takes on culturally distinct
meanings in each case. On the Western side, we can track culture from its
etymology through recent revisions in anthropology and cultural studies;
on the Chinese side, the term reaches back to a very different weave of
cultural discourses.

What is perhaps most striking about Yue’s vision for comparative
literature is the tremendous weight she places on literature and literary
studies. She posits them as the most important areas of global interaction
within the unfolding East-West relations. Comparative literature for Yue
has the power both to challenge the homogenizing effects of crude
globalization (which she identifies with the recent rise of Western
cultural hegemonies) and the dangerously reductive essentialism of
cultural nationalism. For Yue, reading literature in a culturally hybrid
fashion can help us to preserve and respect differences while uncovering
areas of convergence.

This vision of comparative literature can be seen, therefore, as nothing
short of an ethical practice for Yue, who sees reading and discussing
literature across cultural boundaries as a way to prepare for an era of
global multicultural coexistence. However, one can't help but notice that
Yue sees Chinese comparative literature as the only suitable site for this
cultural work, as she argues that only Chinese scholars have the requisite
intercultural foundations for the work ahead. Tuned to the most audible
frequency, Yue’s argument resonates in the broad chords of cultural fusion
and the melodies of non-hierarchical diversity, yet it also follows the
bass notes of a potent Chinese exceptionalism. For decades, American
intellectuals and artists have turned to this nation’s rich cultural
diversity as proof of its own exceptionalism, so such arguments are not
without precedent. Yet Yue’s tireless advocacy of cross-cultural literary
scholarship shaped by her vision of East-West interculturalism with China
at its heart establishes a powerful new set of precedents, and as it takes
on increasingly coherent and compelling contours it will no doubt assert
pressure on comparative literature and the current polycentric nature of
world literature in the twenty-first century. This section is bound to
interest MCLC readers.

Finally,  our book review section of both Chinese and English works rounds
out each issue.

We are currently still offering special pricing for print and digital
subscriptions. Please visit us at www.chineseliterature.com to subscribe
or to read selected items from the issue online.

Cheers,
Jonathan Stalling