MCLC: Zhiqing Lit dissertation

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Zhiqing Lit dissertation
***********************************************************

Source: Dissertation Reviews: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/8024

A review of The “Sent-Down” Vision: Poetics and Politics of
Zhiqing Literature in Post-Mao China, by Yanjie Wang.

Zhiqing 知青 writers are often considered by literary critics as a
generation who express a profound sense of nostalgia in their writing.
Yanjie Wang’s dissertationThe “Sent-down” Vision: Poetics and Politics of
Zhiqing Literature in Post-Mao China is an insightful and probing study
that challenges this conventional yet still prevalent view of zhiqing
literature. Defining the zhiqing generation rather as rootless and
displaced, Wang skillfully investigates what she calls the “sent-down”
vision of the zhiqing writers. She convincingly demonstrates that such a
vision is enabled and enriched by zhiqings’ decade-long rustication
experience and that the past associated with the sent-down experience is
invoked not simply to express nostalgic feelings but rather to offer a
“critique of contemporary China’s massive modernization project” as driven
by developmentalism, materialism, and consumerism (p. 1).

The term “zhiqing,” as Yanjie Wang points out, is abbreviated from zhishi
qingnian 知識青年 (educated youth) and is used in the context of
contemporary 
China to refer particularly to the urban youths who participated in the
“up to the mountains and down to the villages” movement and relocated to
the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (pp. 1-3).   Although much
has been written on thezhiqing generation, most scholarship focuses on
either providing socio-historical narratives of the rustication movement
or surveying their major literary works. Yanjie Wang’s dissertation is,
therefore, a much-welcomed, much-needed addition to the study of zhiqing
literature. Through in-depth analysis of literary works by prominent
zhiqing writers such as Han Shaogong 韓少功, Wang Anyi 王安憶, Ah Cheng 阿
城, and 
Zhang Chengzhi 張承志, Wang examines “the aesthetic, psychological, and
cultural after effect of the sent-down movement,” particularly the way in
which these writers as cultural agents construct their identities and
appropriate the past to critically appraise the present (p. 19). Taking
the notion ofzhiqing literature in its broader sense, Wang emphasizes the
zhiqing identity of the writers covered in her dissertation, yet she does
not restrict her analysis of their literary works to those explicitly
related to the rustication movement, as she states in the Introduction
that she hopes to “investigate the aesthetic reification of the legacies
of the sent-down movement that exceeds the historical event itself” (p.
20).

Chapter 2 on Han Shaogong explores notions of temporality represented in
his essay “The Roots of Literature” as well as his story “Homecoming” 歸去來
and novel A Dictionary of Maqiao 馬橋詞典. Wang argues that post-Mao state
ideology centers on a teleological vision of time, as China’s massive
modernization project has been dominated by the notion of modernity
inherent in the doctrines of global capitalism and developmentalism. Han
Shaogong’s works, however, challenge the homogeneous and linear
temporality of official, hegemonic discourse and propose instead a
heterogeneous sense of time. Wang locates in Han Shaogong’s root-searching
efforts “a perception of national roots in its plurality” that bespeaks
his particular sense of cultural heterogeneity fueled at once by his
notions of spatiality and temporality (p. 37). Through the exploration of
the crisis of identity in “Homecoming” and the use of episodic literary
form in A Dictionary of Maqiao, as Wang forcefully demonstrates in this
chapter, Han Shaogong “undercuts the ideological normality through an
ontological questioning of time,” making his writing “one of the most
powerful political interferences in the present” (p. 85).

Chapter 3 on Wang Anyi explores the issues of gender and sexuality through
close reading of two of Wang Anyi’s works, The Hermitic Age 隱居的時代 and A
Century on a Hillock 崗上的世紀. The author starts the chapter by
foregrounding 
the particular significance of Wang Anyi’s identity as a graduate of
1969—a generation who suffered both a loss of youth and a loss of
ideals—and points out that Wang’s writing “is symptomatic of her troubled
psyche of being a graduate of 1969” (p. 89). The author then examines the
recurrent image of adolescent girls in Wang Anyi’s works to argue that
this image serves “both as a revelation of the sent-down youth’s traumatic
past and redemption of their loss” (p. 101). She further explores the
theme of sexual desire in A Century on a Hillockand rightfully positions
Wang as a writer who celebrates the autonomy of sexuality in defiance of
both the Maoist ideology that represses or even eradicates sexual desire
and the post-Mao discourses of commercialization and commodification of
sex and particularly of the female body.

Chapter 4 on Ah Cheng proposes a new reading of his novellas The King of
Chess 棋王 and The King of Trees 樹王 by investigating the theme of
corporeality. This theme has largely been overlooked by critics, who tend
to focus much of their critical attention on the examination of Chinese
tradition in Ah Cheng’s works. Wang explores corporeality in two senses.
First, by reading The King of Chessagainst zhiqings’ experiences with
hunger, both as food deprivation and as sexual desire, Wang demonstrates
that Ah Cheng’s artistic representations of corporeality greatly challenge
Maoist idealism’s neglect or even negation of the bodily needs of the
people. Second, by emphasizing the environmental consciousness reflected
in The King of Trees, Wang highlights Ah Cheng’s particular concerns with
corporeal ecology and suggests that such concerns reveal his criticism
toward and reflection of the deforestation projects of the Mao era as well
as the environmental abuse that persists in the post-Mao era.

Chapter 5 on Zhang Chengzhi examines the role the Red Guard spirit plays
in various stages of Zhang’s literary career. “The Red Guard 紅衛兵,” a term
that Zhang identifies as his first literary creation, serves as what the
author calls “the matrix” through which Zhang structures his thinking and
writing. Instead of seeing Zhang Chengzhi’s later Islamic fiction as
marking a rupture in his writing, Wang explores the ways in which the Red
Guard spirit, ultimately a rebellious and anti-authoritative stance,
informs and shapes Zhang’s literary creations and contributes to their
metamorphosis. In Zhang Chengzhi’s early writings about the sent-down
experience, Wang identifies an aesthetic ideal of “for the people” that
“fuses the Red Guard ideal with the interest of the people” and “serves as
a redemptive power that revitalizes the Red Guard spirit” (p. 198).
Further exploring the function of the Red Guard spirit in Zhang Chengzhi’s
The Black Steed 黑駿馬 and Investigation of Assassination in the Western
Province 西省暗殺考, Wang argues that “Zhang Chengzhi’s twisted reclamation
of 
the Red Guard spirit and his assertion of religious belief ultimately
constitute a powerful critique of the post-Mao society pervaded by
materialism and consumerism” (p. 31).

In chapter 6, the epilogue, the author envisions future projects current
study ofzhiqing writers can lead to, proposing two very intriguing
projects. One is to explore the works of the zhiqing diaspora writers so
that the examination ofzhiqing literature can be put in a “transnational,
cross-cultural context” (p. 242); the other is to explore “the
construction and reception of zhiqing narratives in feature films,
documentaries, and television dramas” and particularly “the use of affect”
in the visual media (p. 242).

Yanjie Wang’s dissertation The “Sent-Down” Vision: Poetics and Politics of
Zhiqing Literature in Post-Mao China departs from the commonly used
socio-historical approach to the study of zhiqing generation and
successfully uses the lens of literature to explore the subjective and
individualistic accounts of the sent-down experience as well as the
“aesthetic, psychological, and cultural after effect of the sent-down
movement” (p. 19). Skillfully positioning the zhiqing writers both in the
past and the present, the author demonstrates how these zhiqing writers
“carve out an alternative temporal spatiality where the teleological,
urban-based, consumerist, and material notion of modernity is astutely
disputed and unsettled” (p. 240). With its incisive and nuanced arguments,
The “Sent-Down” Vision makes a significant contribution to the study of
zhiqing literature.

Yanhong Zhu
Assistant Professor
East Asian Languages and Literatures
Washington and Lee University
zhuy at wlu.edu

Primary Sources
Ah Cheng 阿城. Qiwang shuwang haiziwang 棋王樹王孩子王 (The King of Chess,
The King 
of Trees and The King of Children). Taipei: Xindi wenxue chubanshe, 1988.
Han Shaogong 韓少功. Gui qu lai 歸去來 (Homecoming). Beijing: Renmin wenxue
chubanshe, 2008.

Han Shaogong韓少功. Maqiao cidian 馬橋詞典 (A Dictionary of Maqiao).
Beijing: 
Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2004.

Wang Anyi 王安憶. Yinju de shidai 隱居的時代 (The Hermitic Age). Shanghai:
Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1999.

Zhang Chengzhi 張承志. Zhang Chengzhi daibiao zuo 張承志代表作
(Representative 
works of Zhang Chengzhi). Zhengzhou: Huanghe wenyi chubanshe, 1988.

Dissertation Information
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2011. 257 pp. Primary Adviser:
Gary Xu.