Chinese Autobiography: 5 Takes

Preface: Inspectional Reading

As I mentioned, in the next stage of my project I'm returning to my favorite guide to study, ever: How To Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren. Since re-reading the section on "inspectional reading," I've begun imagining books summed up quickly and efficiently in groups of 3-5. I'll practice doing this so that I can prove to myself the results of inspectional reading; as for example, "You have now skimmed the book systematically...You should know a good deal about the book at this point, after having spent no more than a few minutes, at most an hour, with it."

Professor Jennifer W. Jay reviewed the latest book on this list, When "I" was Born : Women's Autobiography in Modern China. At the end of the review, she says, "In sum, Wang’s study is a solid contribution to Chinese autobiography, a trail blazed by Pei-yi Wu’s Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton UP, 1989); Wendy Larsen’s Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography (Duke UP, 1991); Janet Ng’s The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century (U of Michigan P, 2003); and Lingzhen Wang’s Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford UP, 2004)." Taking my cue from her, then, I now have

Five Takes

Wu, Pei-yi. The Confucian's Progress : Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Wu Pei-yi wrote the ur-text for discussing the Chinese tradition of autobiography and comparing it to the Western notion of the term; his understanding is that the Confucian tradition presents important constraints to the development of interior exploration in autobiographical writing, and that these constraints are gradually transformed in subsequent years with the development of traditions alternative to strict Confucianism. In the highly innovative second half of The Confucian's Progress, he shows how something very comparable to the Western term "self" develops among several syncretic thinkers of the Song, Ming, and early Qing dynasties. This concept of "self" attempts to bring to terms the various tropes withing Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions. Readings of autobiographical sermons by Buddhist clergy and of three syncretic scholar-officials who lived through the Ming-Qing transition are all powerful proofs that Wu's model of a Chinese sense of "self" has real traction.

(Notably, Wu spends very little time on women's voices.)

Larson, Wendy. Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer : Ambivalence and Autobiography. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Larson's text is even more ambitious than the title makes it sound. Readings of Shen Congwen, Ba Jin, Hu Shi, Lu Xun and finally Guo Moruo do indeed attempt to map out the role of authority, race and nation in Chinese autobiography. But just as important to this book are two preliminary chapters that discuss Sima Qian, Tao Yuanming and other early Chinese autobiographers, as well as several autobiographers of the late Qing. For attempting to bridge pre-modern and modern sensibilities, including a fundamentally language-based look at ways of being, Larson can certainly be said to have answered Professor Wu's call to push ahead with the issue of autobiography in China, though she does not favor the use of the term "self" as he did. Compared with the work of Professor Wu and the three later studies, below, Larson is theoretically more sophisticated, or at least so I take her to be at first glance, since she is sensitive not only to concerns of nation, race and politics but also the formal debates over what autobiography is. She also is very concerned, as I am, with the way that intellectuals see their own social role, including the tremendous anxieties associated with being an intellectual. I'm excited to take a closer look at this soon.

Ng, Janet. The Experience of Modernity : Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Ng argues for closer attention to May-Fourth-era autobiographies because it was during this era that public expressions of personal identities became uniquely representative in a modern sense. Readings of Chen Hengzhe, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Xie Bingying, Xiao Hong, Eileen Chang, Yu Dafu, and Shen Congwen map out the various overlapping degrees of personal, private, interior identity and political, public messages. Her introduction features a nice review of the theoretical material that connects personal expressions with ideology, but is presented in summary fashion that does not indicate any hint that formal or rhetorical analysis will feature big in this work: I suspect I will find too few close readings. There is a brief nod to the continued influence of traditional Chinese biographical models, and I understand at least one of her readings will compare a May-Fourth voice to Qu Yuan. I expect this discussion in particular, as well as the more general capacity of autobiography to have political effectiveness, to be very useful.

Wang, Lingzhen. Personal Matters : Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Beginning with the more familiar lesson about how early modern women's stories exemplify a private self made into a public self, Wang Lingzhen's study is most distinctive for taking this historical narrative through the Cultural Revolution and into the 1980s and 1990s. This contemporary scope requires Professor Wang to engage with the issues of market-based reforms to book and magazine publishing in China after the Cultural Revolution. Chapters 4 and 5 are of key interest here, as they track a path whereby pioneer autobiographer Yu Luojin gained a market for her confessional tales of sex and ennui, but was widely shamed and censured for her trouble. The more successful fate Chen Ran and Lin Bai in the 1990s with their similar autobiographical fiction helps make the case that "privacy literature," particularly by women, had earned wider acceptance under a new regime of consumerism. As this list indicates, Wang does not differentiate between autobiography and fiction much at all, either in authorial intent or reader response -- she prefers a more general approach to "the personal" informed by feminist theory.

Wang, Jing M. When "I" was Born : Women's Autobiography in Modern China. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

Pointing to the patronage of powerful pro-Western literary males like Hu Shi and Lin Yutang, as well as the translation of Western literary models, Wang Jing says women's autobiography emerged between the 1920s through the 1940s. With this historical framework in mind, she creates a short canon of pioneering women's autobiographical voices, with notes on their importance to any course of instruction on Chinese women. Wang's theoretical heuristic pits autobiography against fiction, with fiction acting as a kind of greedy obstruction, sapping attention from autobiography. Autobiographies have their own value quite independent of fiction, a value that rests squarely in the "intentionality" of the author, which Wang Jing sees as a tool to increase the "agency" of early modern Chinese women. Particular strengths that I can identify right away include the focus on patronage -- the influence of Lin Yutang on writers like Yu Lin is particularly intriguing. Also I very much look forward to the discussion of translation: how is it that the Chinese voice ended up using the terms of Western voices? But there are clear signs of weakness in this book as well: the conflict between autobiography and fiction seems to me trumped-up, perhaps indicating a overly-quick of essays like Barthe's "Death of the Author;" also, a cursory glance seems to indicate few close readings, particularly in the translation chapter.