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Resistant Narratives: Chinese Reportage Literature and Its Ideological Function

Sun, April 3, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Washington State Convention Center, Floor: 6th Floor, Room 619

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel provides four studies on how modern Chinese reportage literature resisted and reconstructed mainstream ideologies, and functioned as national and transnational expressions. In the 1930s, reportage literature provided the left wing movement with a writing praxis to approach the mass and popularize literature. Early PRC reportage was an important constituent of socialist realism. Xiaomei Chen argues that post-Mao reportage, by its claim to historicity, achieves a "canonical status of a literary genre" and reconfigures the party-state discourse (94). The socio-political contexts of reportage, Yingjin Zhang observes, allowed reportage writers' ideological self-positioning and interventions. Modern Chinese reportage, as Charles Laughlin states, expresses a collective public consciousness through its imaginative construction. This panel analyzes the ideological undercurrents of literary reportage, and the tensions between personal narratives and official ideology, between writers’ dramatic narrative devices and textual impulse toward emotional realism. Lei Qin studies the impact of German Kischean literary reportage on 1930s Chinese left wing intellectuals' aesthetic pursuits and their exploration of the genre’s political/social function. Li Guo examines Chen Xuezhao’s Visiting Yan’An (1939) and Bai Lang’s The Fourteen of Us (1939) and discusses how war-time autobiographical reportage endow women with a new socio-political agency. Tie Xiao considers Zhu Qianzhi's memoirs as autobiographical reportage, which showed the intersection of the personal and collective and aims to report the author’s personal life to the people. Jie Guo explores Ai Wu's two "sequels" to his Journey to the South, and gender, ethnicity and subject-formation in early 1960s and the post-Mao reportage literature.

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