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Figurations of the Private in Mao-Era Fiction and Scar Literature

Sat, March 28, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Chicago Sheraton Hotel & Towers, Floor: Level 2, Ontario

Abstract

Fredric Jameson’s well-known characterization of modern Chinese literature as “national allegory” figures fiction by twentieth-century Chinese writers as “split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between...in other words, Freud and Marx.” Averse to the abundant “private” and psychological characterizations in modern Chinese fiction, Jameson opts not to incorporate them into his literary-historical project. This paper suggests that there is no need to jettison distinctively private and psychological features in modern Chinese fiction in the name of an undifferentiated “third world” political collectivity.

Public and private space, as highlighted in this panel, figure prominently in early Mao-era fiction. This paper will look at Li Zhun’s “Can't Take That Road” (1953), to elucidate how integral the recoding of space —namely private space— was for writers working under CCP literary guidelines. The clinical precision with which Li Zhun and others reconfigured fictional images of private space and the private thoughts and discourse taking place therein ought not to be overlooked.

Following this, the paper looks at the recoding of space in scar literature (shanghen wenxue). These stories revisit the Cultural Revolution, often in flashback, inserting private, often romantic narratives into public spaces that were at the time the exclusive realm of the discourses of class struggle and political campaigns. The result, as in “The Wounded” (1978) by Lu Xinhua and “Love Must Not Be Forgotten” (1979) by Zhang Jie, is the repopulating of those Cultural Revolution era public spaces with images of private, individual acts and desires.

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