Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of material ecology and explains the pedagogical approach that is embedded in the notion of environmental awareness by applying these methods to examples from contemporary art production and Yu Jian‘s thing poetry. Material ecology is a method of cultural analysis that opens up new perspectives on the relationship between human and nonhuman agents, ecosystems in particular, and on a planetary level. This new outlook is meant to engender a consensual set of environmental values that can transcend national borders. As a concept, environmental awareness applies to efforts by official or unofficial agents to change behavioral patterns that can harm the environment. This is done by demonstrating the consequences of said actions. The two approaches are at the core of the quest for a global polity that can support and integrate different communities in their various endeavors to implement rules and incentives for sustainable ways of living based on environmental justice. These must be widely agreed upon in order to commit all social levels, be it individuals, local communities, or transnational stakeholders. Since cultural representations fulfill a seminal role in changing world-views, I will discuss a selection of Chinese literary and art-works which serve as examples of this new perspective on things in material ecology. Highlighting the transformation of landscapes through globalized, unsustainable patterns of urbanization, agri-industrial production, electric power generation, resource extraction and waste disposal, the paper will first explore how nonhuman agency needs to be reimagined, perceived, researched and taught as well as aesthetically represented and narrated in the wake of this transition. In a second step, it will introduce Kunming poet Yu Jian’s thing poetry. I will argue that the poet aims at the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility that can overcome the modern world’s obsession with façades, masks, and surfaces in general—be they composed of words or images. Subverting the regimes of data and information acquisition by means of a kind of haptic epistemology, Yu Jian’s creative bricolage of Anglo-American nature writing, European modernist realism, Chinese Taoist animism, and traditional shanshui, or landscape art does not only promote environmental awareness, but moreover transcends linguistic and visual modes of communication. Hence, his poetry brings to the fore humanity’s material embeddedness and protests against the materialist annihilation of nonhuman worlds and things. PubDate: 2019-03-14
Abstract: Ethnic minority films account for a significant part of the Chinese film industry. Since the establishment of the new China, Chinese ethnic minority films have gone through three stages. In the beginning of the new century through today, when tremendous changes have taken place in film ecology and production situations in the context of globalization. In this stage, the ethnic minority film is no longer a propaganda tool but instead has become an integral part of multiculturalism in a global context. The antiespionage theme, folk tales, and industrial and agricultural construction themes have no successors; the self-examination and root-seeking themes are also no longer favored by producers. Thus, ethnic minority films have almost lost their competitiveness in the cinema chains and their ability to win the attention of mainstream viewers. PubDate: 2019-03-09
Abstract: In this paper, the author studies female characters in literature of the Great Leap Forward period from the historical perspective of contemporary Chinese literature. The reproduction issue is the main focus of the present paper and it is found out that most of female characters in literature of the Great Leap Forward period do not have reproduction experiences (childness images). Thus, reproduction, as a gender symbol of the female identities, gradually faded away in literature of that time, and the female characters were eventually replaced with the neutralized (or even masculinized) images who were physically stronger and more capable of social functions. This paper presents three contributors to this avoidance of the reproduction issue in literature of the Great Leap Forward period as follows. The first contributor is that reproduction as a part of the personal life was suppressed by the revolution and the mission of national rescue continued to remain as a mainstream mindset even during the process of national developments. The second contributor is that the clash between the gender equality promoted in literature of Yan’an period and the cause of socialist construction was exacerbated and became even more pronounced in the Great Leap Forward period. And the last contributor is that the ‘People’s Commune’, an ideal and fundamental form of the social structure at that time consisting of ‘workers, farmers, businessmen, students, and soldiers’, had the potential to replace families based on blood ties. PubDate: 2019-03-04
Abstract: This article starts from Hua Qing’s writing and criticism practice. It reviews the connection of Hua Qing’s “Ascending Poetry” and “Returning Home Poetry” with Chinese traditional classic poetry and German existentialism, thus showing a process of and intention for ontological life poetics through mutual authentication between poetry and criticism. PubDate: 2019-03-01
Abstract: The paper discusses Zhai Yongming’s 翟永明 (b. 1955) most recent long poem, “Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang” (随黄公望游富春山, 2015). In this text, Zhai revisits a Yuan handscroll, the classic artistic medium of literati aesthetics, and turns it into the departure point for her own exploration of modern Chinese poetry. As in many of her other poems, in this work Zhai creatively navigates her way through poetic legacies from the remote past in order to comment upon the present socio-cultural situation. For example, she questions the hegemony of the male voice in the Chinese poetic tradition and references the topic of the possibility of gendered, genuinely female, poetics. She also introduces a contemporary ecocritical perspective into the discussion of the genre of landscape poetry when she turns to the ongoing transformation of the natural environment by the forces of modernization. The paper offers a preliminary inquiry into the dense text with a focus on its gendered ecocritical edge. From this vantage point, it seeks to shed light on the creative tensions between past and present in Zhai’s poetry. PubDate: 2019-02-27
Abstract: Among the four literary categories of ancient Chinese classics, the Zi collection (子部), the third category including works of the philosophers, arts, novels and etc., is the least utilitarian and can best represent the essence of aesthetic tastes and the playful nature of Chinese people. However, the tradition of the Zi collection has been misinterpreted, depreciated, and eventually distorted since the modern times which was overburdened by the missions of ‘enlightenment, revolution, and national rescue’. It is the rise of the web fiction and its ‘virtual space’ in particular that furnishes the ‘playful nature’ the best, safest, and freest environment to ‘revive’. Meanwhile, the trend of ‘reviving the Zi collection’ extends beyond the cyber literature to the scope of elite literature. PubDate: 2019-02-27
Abstract: How to reconstruct the subject is a pressing problem of joint concerns for the Eastern and Western culture. The Western culture which has gone through the processes of enlightenment and secularization needs to distance itself from the increasingly digitalized and formalized subject, while China which lacks in the similar experiences still needs to reinforce the subject through the acceptance of the Western culture in general and its reason and rational criticism in particular. ‘Qi’ as the subject in Jiang Hao’s poems manifests that the interaction can be realized in the same poem. PubDate: 2019-02-27
Abstract: Taking the debate between Yan Jiayan and Liu Qing in the early 1960s about Liang Sheng-pao’s image in Builders of a New Life as an example, the image of “new man” has been generally considered to be a reflection of the shortcomings of “Seventeen-Year Literature” and “Cultural Revolution Literature” since the 1980s, which is why later researchers and writers rejected it. This essay argues holds the idea that the concept of “new man” has existed since ancient times. Archetypal figures in literary history are not fixed, but always change alongside the era and in relation to society; this is what underlies the legitimacy of the image of “new man”. The “historical trauma” caused by “Seventeen-Year Literature” and “Cultural Revolution Literature” is what causes scholars to an overly narrow bias against the “new man” image. Revisiting the significance and the changes undergone by this image will help us to explain literary history and related literary phenomena, helping the future literary creation find a way of grasping reality. PubDate: 2019-02-20
Abstract: Buddhist rhetoric refers to a cultural resource which is mixed up with folk belief and intermittently appear in ‘Red’ (revolutionary) narratives. It was used as a tool to endorse and validate the revolution in an era characteristic of a high degree of uniformity in ideological and literary concepts. The political purpose of ‘Red’ Narratives, namely ‘to divinize the revolution’, was effectively realized through borrowing ‘renunciation’ mode and the metonymic meaning of the temple space from Buddhist rhetoric, which both manifests the profound and subtle interaction between Buddhism and modern Chinese literature, and also decodes the creation and the narration style of the ‘Red’ novels. PubDate: 2019-02-18
Abstract: The global power dynamics with the new and old forces is undergoing subtle but profound changes. Contemporary China has managed to make its comeback to the center stage of the world with phenomenal advances in many fields, but its cultural influence has seriously lagged behind. The growing Chinese ‘cultural consciousness’ will challenge the stereotypical perceptions of China from other countries. Therefore, the significance of discussions on the ‘contemporary’ nature of contemporary Chinese literature and its place in the canon of world literature lies in the close connection between literature and the reality and the need of contemporary Chinese literature to reflect the current relationship between ‘China’ and the ‘world’. China’s reentry into the new order of the world will definitely bring about the corresponding representations of this historical period in the respects of literary imagination and creation. PubDate: 2019-02-14
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