Postmodemist Theory in Recent Studies of Chinese Literature
by Anne Birrell
Guide to the Contents
- Liminality, Rites de Passage, Marginality, Boundaries
- Inscribing the Self
- The Representation of Self
- Narratology
- Desire and Disenchantment
- Gender As a Category of Literary Analysis
- Reading and the Reader
- Myth Studies and Literature
- Art and Literature
- Translations and Editions
- Anthologies
Conclusion
Preamble
The past decade has seen an explosion of Sinological interest in the application of postmodernist theoretical approaches to a variety of works in the Chinese literary tradition. This reflects the shift in Western literary studies away from the traditional humanistic disciplines of philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetics, toward the human sciences of sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and linguistics. The evolution of these disciplines in recent decades has been so marked that it constitutes a break, or rupture, with the past. This shift in perspective and this rupture with tradition is generally known as Postmodernism, and in its current expression it derives from the theoretical writings of the Paris School of the Human Sciences since the 1970s. The most influential among these writings has been Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, Lacan's psychoanalytical theory of the self, and Derrida's textual deconstruction. The interrelatedness of the formerly autonomous disciplines has generated a new language, or discourse, which is primarily centered in the study of literature, with such terms as hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, and intertextuality, which is more than the traditional concepts of literary quotation, borrowing, imitation, and rewriting. Besides these new terms, Postmodernism has appropriated old words, such as reader and audience, or subject and object, self and other, and has made them function as revisionary, complex critical terms.
Central to this radical shift in critical perspective has been the foregrounding of what had previously been overlooked, or invisible, in a cultural or literary tradition. The most important new subject in postmodernist discourse is gender, which generally denotes Woman, in terms of the female as a gender construct, or as a component in gender relations, and especially as a rhetorical medium for exploring logic and language within a cultural or literary system.
The new subjects of postmodernist discourse include the following, listed in no particular sequence, to point up the variety of approaches: marginality , liminality , or the notion of boundaries (Van Gennep, Mary Douglas); transgressive writing and the avant garde (poggioli); the ludic (Huizinga); the pleasure of the text (Barthes); homoerotics (Foucault); disciplinary regimes (Foucault); the gaze, or theories of looking (Freud, Lacan); narratology (Genette, Todorov); approaches to the body (social body, the body politics, and the female body); laughter (Baudelaire, Cixous); jouissance (Lacan, Kristeva, lrigaray); pornography; concepts of readability versus the writable (lisible/scriptible); the cultural other (Said); popular and elite cultural interaction; and cultural imperialism (Said).
Numerous recent studies by Sinologists who specialize in literary studies have shown a remarkable willingness to engage with the theories, concepts, approaches, and terminology of Postmodernism. In their work they have pursued a revisionary imperative which has resulted in the rediscovery of many neglected literary works in the tradition, and in the awareness of new subjects of critical inquiry. This article constitutes a brief survey of some of the new trends in the study of Chinese literature. It is limited to 74 books and 15 articles published between 1986 and 1999.