MCLC: Bringing Wolf Totem to screen (2,3)

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Bringing Wolf Totem to screen (2,3)
Re Kristin Stapleton’s question about Jo Lusby’s claim: “There has without question been no one single novel in China with as great of an impact before or since ‘Wolf Totem.”’ (NYT) I take it as marketing hyperbole. If Ms. Lusby were correct, then we’d have reason to be worried. The original Chinese novel, which is much longer than and very different from the English translation, propagates a warmed-over social Darwinian ideology, which I critique in my book The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford UP, 2014). I see nothing remarkable about the novel passing censorship. Even as it laments the environmental destructions, it loudly trumpets the developmentalist logic of the state: be strong (like wolves) or be eaten (like sheep). As in 落后就要挨打.
Haiyan Lee haiyan at stanford.edu
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Wasn’t Ba Jin’s work marketed (and marketable) in the period it was written? The list of “influential” novels written in Chinese is indeed breathtaking. Even in Ba Jin’s time. Hype is distracting, but it’s a part of a game played by Literature as well.
Sean Macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 26, 2015
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