Popular *and* Elevated: Revised Abstract

So my panel at the ACCL conference is called "Popular and Elevated: Overlapping Roles for Intellectuals" and my paper is called "A Life of Ideas: Yang Jiang as a Cultural Icon." This morning I re-tooled my abstract. More to come, including a Chinese translation.


The icon, the audience

Yang Jiang (1911-), writes in her 2003 memoir, Women sa (We Three), that "Our little family was a very plain one, a very pure one. We were never ambitious, and we were never competitive." With this tone of testimony, Yang Jiang gives an account of herself to her audience, detailing tremendous fortitude in the face of political struggle. Although Yang Jiang's autobiographical writing was an immediate success in the early 1980s, the character of her reputation has changed significantly since the publication of We Three in 2003. This book was a bestseller that made Yang Jiang a common topic of discussion in mainstream media and on the internet. Readers are inspired by Yang Jiang's example to love literature, language and a certain way of being. In short, since 2003 Yang Jiang has become a cultural icon, a figure whose received personality has come to symbolize the life of the intellectual, the joy of reading and study, and even the continued importance of humanities higher education in China.

Yang Jiang's rapid rise to the level of icon offers us a case study for the role of the elder intellectual in early 21st-century China. Elder intellectuals tend to produce memory writing in a wide variety of genres: life lessons, reminiscence essays, elegies, prefaces, journals, notes, autobiography and more. As the case of Yang Jiang shows, readers of Chinese are intimately familiar with all of these forms, and they actively read to build role models out of their elders. The respect, authority and popularity of elder writers across a wide range of audiences is phenomenon that is generally little understood in the English-speaking world. This preliminary investigation hopes only to serve as a motivation for future study.

Update: a preliminary Chinese version (not for consumption just yet)

楊絳2003年發表的《我們仨》寫了: “我們這個家，很樸素；我們三個人，很單純。我們與世無求，與人無爭，只求相聚在一起，相守在一起，各自做力所能及的事。” 用這樣又自省又自信的態度，楊絳敘述的是支持困難中中國知識份子的毅力,引起了大眾的歌頌。從80年代開始，楊絳的傳記文學作品都受了歡迎。但是從 2003年《我們仨》發表了後，她的名誉又改變了。《我們仨》是暢銷書，使大眾注意到楊絳、錢鐘書、錢媛的人格與家庭生活。楊絳家的傳記文學現在是變成讓 讀者灵思泉涌的藝術品。讀者看這種書而多對文學、語言、與道德有興趣。總之說，叢2003左右而來，楊絳變成了一種文化英雄，她現在是學習人文欣賞文學的 符號。

楊絳變成文化英雄是值得關注的現象。第一，這一種的英雄是解放前國外留學的老人作家。革命後，這些作家寫的大多是多種傳記文學，包括散文與自傳。楊絳這個人寫了不少傳記作品，而且她98歲的人還在勤奮地工作。楊絳的讀者都很佩服她又高齡又樸素，又傳統又西化的身份。這個小報告的目的是介紹楊絳身份與讀者怎麼受影響。