Jing Wang (1) (1950–)

Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.

In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought--Li Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School--that came into play in the Culture Fever. She also critiques the controversial mini-series Yellow River Elegy. In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism," refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s.

This book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.… (meer)

As the introduction describes it, the avant-garde period in Chinese fiction was relatively short, with most of the production between the years 1987 and 1989. The avant-garde fiction was marked by a turn from politically focused literature towards a more experimental, literature-for-literature's approach. Most of the stories in this collection have an element of ambiguity and uncertainty, a calling into question of the very nature of narrative. The first two stories, both from Ge Fei, are investigations, the first ("Remembering Mr. Wu You") a murder mystery, the second ("Green Yellow") a historical investigation, which only become more puzzling the farther the searcher enters into them.

One other element running through many stories is violence, sometimes quite savage in nature. Yu Hua's "1986" tells of a man obsessed by the violence of China's ancient past and broken by the violence of its recent past, and his reenactment of that same violence. Bei Cun's "The Big Drugstore" spins its tale of an herbalist's shop into nightmarish dimensions. Su Tong's fiction resembles Ge Fei's in its irresolvable mysteries, but in "The Brothers Shu" also gives us a boy giving rein to his savage side.

The collection finishes off with a handful of stories that evoke the modern crafter of labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges. Sun Ganlu's "I Am a Young Drunkard" makes allusion to the "blind Argentinean" before going on to tell of the narrator's encounter with an old poet, a tale quite poetic in itself. Ma Yuan's "A Wandering Spirit" begins with an epigraph from Borges, then proceeds to a twisting narrative where truths collide.… (meer)