One Book in One Day: Well, Maybe Next Time

Writing Cultural Heroes (not me, by a long shot)

I've already described the first essay in this collection, which helped me think about why I might call Yang Jiang a "cultural hero." But I never read the other eight essays included here, mostly because I still read Chinese much too slowly. To overcome this frustration, I've adapted Adler and Van Doren's techniques of "inspectional reading." My goal was to "inspect" all nine essays on Tuesday. For various reasons, I could not spend the entire day reading, nor did I do so on Wednesday, and on Thursday I took up most of the day with this task, but found myself easily distracted. (Scholarship with an internet-ready laptop presents distraction, temptation and ultimately dissipation, a folly that I hope to combat with Ben Franklin-like assiduousness. But that's more a topic for phramok than Wandermonkey). At last, though, on Thursday afternoon I completed my inspections. Here is the reduction of 20 or so pages of notes.

当代大众文化批评丛书

Writing Cultural Heroes is a volume in the Contemporary Popular Culture Criticism Series -- I'll make a list of other titles to look at in this series soon. The series editor is Li Tuo, who in his series preface gently chides scholars for not developing popular culture studies as a field. MTV may not seem important to scholars, he says by way of example, but they all need to recognize that young people reinforce their ideas of what is right, wrong, ugly and beautiful 美丑对错 with MTV. Hence popular culture, which is any and all books and media produced for a mass-market, is an important topic of study. The western world has already developed theories of popular culture, but these need to be analyzed carefully by the Chinese. Back when postmodernism became a fad, some scholars who lacked prudence 谨慎 thought that China in the 1990s was already in the postindustrial age!

1. Top-Tier Cultural Heroes

Yang Zao explains how Chen Yinke and Gu Zhun represent two major pathways by which an established scholar forgotten during the Communist years could rise again to gain iconic status in the 1980s and 1990s.

2. The Road to Self-Redemption 自我救赎之路

Jia Guimei describes the ways victims of the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaigns have written about their experiences in novels, memoirs, and mainstream historical works. For Jia, 1998 is a year of particular interest because so many books on these experiences appeared.

3. The Decline and Fall of Chinese Poetry 诗神的降落

Zhou Zan gives us an extensive outline of poetry movements since the Cultural Revolution, focusing on the bifurcation between more elevated forms and so-called "people's writers" 民间作家. The gloomy conclusion is that poetry as a form is probably dying in China.

4. The Canonization of Jin Yong 金庸小说经典化

A fascinating account of Jin Yong's evolving status as the most-read author in the Chinese diaspora. The development of "Jin Yong studies" at Peking University gives author Wu Xiaoli a chance to reflect on how Jin Yong has helped elevate all popular literary forms in the eyes of China's teachers. Not everybody likes Jin Yong: Wang Shuo has a big problem with him.

Jin Yong 2009: Who da man?

5. Morte accidentale di cinese Avante garde 先锋的结束

Wang Chang examines the staging and reception of the 1998 Nobel Prize-winner in Literature's most representative work, the play Morte accidentale di un anarchico. That few Chinese scholars were even aware of the play or its author, Dario Fo, just goes to show the bankruptcy of the Chinese avant garde.

6. The Spirit of the Age has Symptoms: How Steel Was Tempered in 2000

How Steel Was Tempered (1934-ish) is apparently one of the most important Soviet Realist novels, though I'm just learning about it here. See, for example, a nice reading in a book on the female protagonist in Russian literature. A close reading of the main character Pavel and his romantic interest Gaia as the appear in the year-2000 feature-length TV version in China reflects the peculiar official (re)vision of a hero during a period of millenium fever.

7. Ain't Got Nuthin' 一無所有 : Cui Jian and Chinese Rock

Meng Wa gives a fun and enlightening examination of the spirit of resistance as exhibited in Cui Jian's biography and career. Meng's close reading of the song "Eggs Under/laid by the Red Flag" 紅旗下之蛋 gives me my first glimpse at how parody can work in China.

Cover of a Cui Jian Album

8. Say Hello to Mr. Fashion 時尚先生

This examination of the magazine "Fashion" 時尚 over the course of 1995-2000 is definitely my least favorite piece in the book. Concluding what is really no more than a report on the contents of the magazine, Ms. Mei hopes that readers get a sense that the figures in "Fashion" can become exemplary. But how so? She seems to recognize the weakness of her argument -- or more precisely, that she lacks any argument at all.

"Fashion" later merged with Cosmo

9. Privacy Fever 隱私熱

Teng Wei profiles a 1998 explosion of confessional and testimonial writing onto the Chinese market: "privacy fever." This is an excellent piece -- I remember that Wang Lingzhen covered the same topic from a different angle, and I intend to come back to this and to compare the two essays.

The original privacy bestseller became a TV movie in 2005

Dai Jinhua 戴锦华, editor. Shuxie wenhua yingxiong: shiji zhi jiao de wenhua yanjiu 书写文化英雄：世纪之交的文化研究 [Writing cultural heroes: cultural studies at the turn of the century]. Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2000.