Fulbright Proposal

edit 8/3/2009

I revised this proposal Monday morning and sent it off to my university's Fulbright adviser with a couple of questions. I regret putting off most work on this until August, but apparently I am still stuck in the world of putting off annoying jobs until the what I consider is the last possible moment...

Jesse Field
Fulbright Proposal: Draft 3

Abstract:

This study will explore the tremendous significance of autobiography to the contemporary Chinese literary scene. I investigate the works of one major autobiographer, Yang Jiang, in detail, showing how her long career as an established literary figure helped make her highly crafted memories of China’s tumultuous 20th century exempt from censure, accepted in Chinese school curriculums, and major bestsellers. A full analysis of the rhetoric and the reception of this still under-studied type of writing reveals the true social and political power of Chinese literature today.

First Image in Yang Jiang's Google today

Proposal:

It is a little-known fact that one of the most popular and influential literary forms in the Chinese-speaking world is autobiography. Professor Zhao Baisheng, a major Chinese theorist of autobiography, has decried the neglect of autobiography common among Chinese academics. Recently, several new studies in Chinese and in English have begun to correct this neglect by attending to the emergence of modern vernacular autobiography in China in the period between World War I and World War II, an event of incredible significance for all Chinese writers, especially for women writers, who are traditionally under-represented in Chinese literature. In what ways do women writers continue to dominate autobiographies in China? How do China’s most popular and enduring autobiographies gain their readerships? In what ways do the subjects of these autobiographies become role models disseminated in schools and in popular media, and how much power do these subjects have as cultural icons? To begin answering these questions, I have selected Yang Jiang (1911-) as a case study embedded in a much more general course of readings.

Yang Jiang is a noted female literary figure whose career as a memoirist is only the latest phase in a long life of teaching, playwriting, translating and literary scholarship; it is also a phase that coincides exactly with the great changes in China in the thirty years since the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1972, during the Cultural Revolution,Yang Jiang and her husband, the novelist and literary critic Qian Zhongshu, lived in a remote rural work unit called a 'cadre school;' both faced the possibility of living out their old age planting turnips and cleaning toilets. But by 1978, in the first phase of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, both were reinstated as full members of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Reestablished in Beijing as she approached her seventies, Yang Jiang’s literary output flourished, first with the publication of her Don Quixote translation (1978), followed closely by her autobiographical essay collection Six Chapters of My Life in a Cadre School (1981). In 1989, she produced Baptism, a semi-autobiographical novel describing life for intellectuals during the early Mao era (1949-1951). In the 1990s, though she continued to produce critical essays and reminiscences, it seemed that the family had entered retirement. Their daughter, Qian Yuan, passed away in 1997, and Qian Zhongshu died in 1998. But in 2003, Yang Jiang published a new work called We Three detailing the life of the family in a unique, fragmented format combining autobiographical essay and experimental fiction. This book sold millions of copies by the end of 2003; on the internet, blogs and reviews began to cite Yang Jiang as an example of the ideal humanistic life. Still relentlessly active in her artistic and historical vision, then 96-year-old Yang Jiang found time to publish a new essay collection in 2007, Walking on the Margins of Life: Questions and Answers of Myself; this too was an immediate bestseller, with her Taiwan publisher ranking it as number 23 on their list of bestselling books of 2008.

I hypothesize that Yang Jiang has come to symbolize one kind of ideal Chinese intellectual. Her negotiation of marriage and parenthood on the one hand and work and professional life on the other essentially solve the central tension in the lives of working women, thus making her a role model for women readers. Her advanced age has given her a special elder status in Chinese literature. Chinese readers look to elder writers generally as role models in a broad, complex way that many Western readers have failed to notice. This respect for elder writers is even more pronounced among contemporary readers of the particular generation of intellectuals that took up active public roles between 1919 and 1949, now seen as a golden age of new literary and artistic forms. As a member of this generation, Yang Jiang thus represents a broad set of elder role models for today’s Chinese readers.

My investigation will take advantage of three crucial resources in Beijing. First, local academics can talk to me about Yang Jiang’s past roles at Tsinghua University and at CASS. Second, Yang Jiang’s publishers can supply crucial information about Yang Jiang’s current and past sales, and how extensively her work has been used in Chinese classrooms. Lastly, Yang Jiang herself has directed students to the Tsinghua University archives for evidence to support her autobiographical testimony. I will pursue such disputed questions as her husband’s employment during WWII and the case of her son-in-law’s suicide during the Cultural Revolution, always keeping in mind that the tone and form of the historical evidence yields as much about the issues at hand as the facts themselves. One final potential resource is Yang Jiang herself, who is still alive and working. Wu Xuezhao, author of the 2008 book Listening to Yang Jiang Talk About the Past, has graciously offered to act as an intermediary on my behalf.

Wu Xueshao's name on a manuscript submission form I found...weird, huh?

My base for these investigations will be the Institute of World Literature at Peking University, where I will work with Professor Zhao Baisheng. Professor Zhao is a founding member of the International Auto/biography Association, where he regularly works to foster exchange between scholars of biographical literature from all over the world.

Zhao Baisheng -- more to come if I get over to Peking University

He’s also the author A Theory of Auto/biography (2003), one of the first Chinese-language works describing biographical literature (or “auto/biography”) as a field of literature that deserves to be an object of study in its own right. He has graciously agreed to allow me to participate lectures and roundtable discussions that will help familiarize me with Chinese literary scholars. I will spend the first month of my program establishing contacts (e.g. students who research Yang Jiang under Professor Zhao’s direction). In the second month, I will mine the Qinghua archive to build my own database of documents that can corroborate, deny or otherwise inform historical questions left open in Yang Jiang’s memoirs. In the remaining months, I will revisit the archive as needed and continue to interview Yang Jiang’s readers and publishers to build a picture of how a single established autobiographer’s work can have influence in university settings, be on secondary school curriculum guides, and even make the author a popular culture icon.