E ASIAN 352 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, New Culture Movement
28 Feb 2020
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Document Summary
In the last unit, the discovery of the self, we explore the new ways in which writers are talking about characters, about individual experience, about interiority, and psychological realism. Now, we plan to talk about how literature responds to changing experiences of space, and of place. In the proces, we are introduced to roads, vehicles, as well as other spaces: teahouses, rickshaw garages, middle-class interiors, slums, and so on. Changing landscapes, feelings of location and rootedness, but also dislocation. New kinds of literary experiment: modernism (zhang ailing) and primitivism (shen congwen) Note on positions of zhang ailing (1920-1995) and shen congwen (1902-1988) within literary field. From political standpoint, these two writers are out of place in the canon of the modern chinese literature. Retroactive positioning from a cold war perspective: zhang becomes as american, writes in english, and works for the cia, dies in los angeles apartment in 1995.
