Dissertation Retreat Day 1

Good day of reading and working: three full essays completely read through and annotated. One I got through was "Huahuar the Cat" which shows up on a Baidu blog along with this illustration. The essay begins:

I probably can't be counted a cat lover, because I have only loved one or two cats, and even then only because they weren't like other cats, and even almost surpassed the feline.

I was happy to have stumbled into that corner of the internet!
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伊奧兒之憤 The Frustrations of Eeyore

It's not quite true that I did no writing on Thursday; I did write the following book review:
The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff


My rating: 1 of 5 stars
The Fèn of Eeyore.

One day I was walking through the bog, gazing wistfully at the muddy water, when I came across Eeyore in his den. A lovely smell was coming out of the crumbling donkey shelter.

"Hallo old friend. What's cooking?"

"Hola, amigo. Why this is just a simple zuppa verde. Thistles and nettles from the bog you know, but quite good when cooked in buttered broth. Farina grains add bulk and thickness, what what. Ho ho! But what's this, you're looking a bit doom-and-gloom, my friend. What has happened to your cheerful demeanor?"

"Oh Eeyore, it is Very Good to see you again. I've just been reading The Te of Piglet you see, and it has got me feeling...that is, a bit..."

"Ho-ho! Say no more. That book has the wrong title, to start with. Actually it has the wrong everything. It's not really about anything. Though of course certain parties are trodden on..."

"Yes, I believe that's what's left me so conflicted. And, well, so you know, then, that...uhm..."

"Yes, I know. Oh I know. It was me what was trod, yup? I'm the odd bits which got smithered on. I certainly know all this. You needn't mention it. And after all, one can't complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said 'Bother!'. The Social Round. Always something going on."

"You know, Eeyore, I can't help but feel that this time this Tao and Te fellow has gone over the line. I mean, really, Educational System Eeyores? And what's this nonsense about 'Eeyore Amazons'? Could you make head or tail out of that (so to speak)?"

"Ah yes, those misfit feminists with their 'overabundance of masculine energies.' Do you mean to say you find the fellow unqualified to measure the proper amount of 'masculine energy'?"

"The thought had occurred to me."

"Haha, well it's all quite amusing really. In a quiet way, that is, and without being really helpful. As you no doubt gathered, the book is said to be about Piglet, but there's really very little of Piglet in it at all."

"Quite true -- I was surprised at that."

"You shouldn't be, my friend! Oh, I tell you, in this world nearly every creature suffers from a Positively Startling Lack of Brain. The result of course is that the books they write aren't about what they thought they would write about. Probably this book did start out about Piglet, but soon a bit of chaff flew by, or else a new smell entered the air, and before the author knew it, he was Whining again, as he is of course wont to do.

Now for your information, in China, Whining is actually an art."

"Really? But isn't that annoying to readers?"

"Not at all! Not when done properly. And not if the listeners feel the same way about matters. Why, down in the bogs and swamps of China I have visited with Donkeys, Monkeys, DonkMonks, and Key-Dons of all shapes and sizes, all perfectly able to spend an entire evening Whining. Whining's good for the soul, after all, for once you're done you've cleaned yourself out. You've taken out all your bile and whatnot and spillt it out into the bog water, where it makes no difference at all."

"Oh! I think I see where you are going with this. And so The Te of Piglet..."

"Right. It's entirely whining, from beginning to end. What little we see of poor Piglet is purposely obscured to make it seem as if we are all actually already either Whiners or Worth Whining About. Which is perfectly true, by the way!"

"I see. So back to the title. You said it had the wrong title. Perhaps it should be called Whining?"

"Yes. Since our friend likes Chinese terms so much, he might have called it after the Chinese term for a "whining," which refers to the scattering and drawing out of the bile, or indignation, which is called "fen." "Whining" is a verb, but "fen" is a nice solid noun which refers to the bile in the heart. So I do think he should have called it The Fen."

"I see, yes. But then again it wouldn't do to call it The Fen. It needs an Animal, don't you think? Perhaps The Fen of Piglet would be better?"

"Don't be daft. That silly bit of fluff hasn't the confidence to Whine in a full-throated, belly-emptying way. No, no, Piglet would never do."

"Come to think of it, as we said before, the Animal that whines most is you, Eeyore."

"Why thank you very much. I was so hoping someone would notice!"

"Ah! Now I have it. Our friend only seems to dislike you, Eeyore. He whines about Eeyores. But since Eeyores are the whiners, then he too is an Eeyore. Why don't we call the book The Fen of Eeyore?"

"Oh, my goodness. I couldn't accept that. Oh, no, really. Me? The star of a book? Well, suppose I do know a thing or two. I've a brain. Say, do you want to stay awhile? Have some zuppa?"

"Wonderful! I've some beer in this bag, if that interests you."

"It may interest me, sir. Perhaps as much as anything ever does, in any case. Drinking beer never did anyone any good. Then again, the world is in such a state, a few beers are certainly called for. Oh! Everybody has been Wrong about Everything. I tell you! Especially Wrong about Me. Why, what Whining we shall have tonight, sir..."

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Getting ready to teach Lao She

Cover for the French edition of Under the Red Banner

Interesting: just as with Yang Jiang, Lao She has found a French readership. The "avant–propos" of translator Paul Bady stands out in the CAJ database for being the only article to consider Lao She's text as autobiography (as usual, Chinese scholarship tends to dwell on the ideological significance of the text). Bady emphasizes the subject's unique precocity, his flair for dramatic, and most of all his candid and intimate observations of kith and kin.



Full citation:

Bady, Paul 保尔·巴迪. "Lao She zizhuanti xiaoshuo 'Zheng hong qi xia' de dutexing" 老舍自传体小说《正红旗下》的独特性 [The Uniqueness of Lao She's Autobiographical Novel Under the Red Banner.] Translated by Wu Yongping 吴永平. Studies of Ethnic Literature 民族文学研究 2004, issue 4 [retrieved full-text from CAJ Database].
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Forward to the Song Dynasty

Map of the Song, marked with the territory lost in 1279

It's time to end Unit 1 of my class. Historiography-wise, we are done learning about the various points on the traditional dynastic sequence of Warring-States, Han dynasty, and Period of Disunion: that is, we see the textbook example of the rise and fall of a unified Chinese dynasty.

I'm not including any readings from the Tang dynasty, so I will skip right over it with brief mention (sorry, class -- maybe on another iteration we'll do Li Bai). Tomorrow the students are expecting to talk about the autobiography of Li Qingzhao and a one or two of her poems, so I'll need to give them a brief historical background.

A map shows us that the important thing to know about the Song is that half of the kingdom was lost to the Northern Jin in 1179. I mention my favorite image of the Khitan, their funny pots:



Quickly, though, we have to move on to Li Qingzhao. We'll talk about her autobiography, certainly -- that's the central feature of this lecture. We'll also explore a bit of her lyric poetry as well, though:

One poem covered by Theresa Teng.



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Autobiographical Subjects

Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

p. 48

Memory

(See my last entry)

Experience

When the evidence offered is the evidence of "experience," the claim for referentiality is further buttressed -- what could be truer, after all, than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation-as a foundation on which analysis is based that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference. By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodox history, these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place. They take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference. They locate resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it. When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one's vision is structured-about language (or discourse) and history-are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what it constitutes who see and act in the world.

"The Evidence of Experience"
Joan W. Scott
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 773-797

Identity

"Some models of identity culturally available in the United States over the last three hundred years have included the sinful Puritan seeking signs of salvation, the self-made man, the struggling and suffering soul, the innocent quester, the "bad" girl or boy, the adventurer, and the trickster." -p. 34

While President Obama’sbiracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s
pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides
said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors, when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.” -- The New York Times, October 8, 2009

Embodiment

The rhetoric of the "body" is trendy in feminism; it's interesting to think about how it makes its return to the male-centered world...

Agency

Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984.

...

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Memory

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Chapter 2, "Autobiographical Subjects"

It's hard to evaluate this book: it mainly seems a rather bland literature review, but one that nevertheless introduces key terms and interesting examples. In place of my typical effort to annotate the argument carefully, I'm going to try taking at least parts of the text in a "commonplace book" mode. This from the first section of chapter 2, devoted to "memory."

Olney on Augustine, Memory and Narrative, 19-21

Silko, Leslie. Storyteller. New York: Arcarde Publishers, Little Brown & Co., 1981.

Engel, Susan. Context Is Everything: the Nature of Memory. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1999.

Wolf, Christa. Patterns of Childhood: (formerly a Model Childhood). New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1984.

Alexie, Sherman. First Indian on the Moon. Brooklyn N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1993.

"communities of memory"

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking, or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

"an intersubjective phenomenon" mitchell 193 n17

Augustine's pears

Akmatova, A Poem without a Hero

"communities of memory"

Akhmatova, Anna. A Poem Without a Hero. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973. (trauma, conscience) ; Art's ... dead mother, n2 "postmemory"

scriptotherapy

Henke, Suzette. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Fraser, Sylvia. My father's house : a memoir of incest and of healing. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988.

Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

The "self-absorption" fallacy:

Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York NY: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1998.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Autobiography. Boston Mass.: D.R. Godine, 1982.

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On Autobiography

One Way for French Theory to Come to America

Lejeune, Philippe and Eakin, Paul John. On Autobiography. Translated by Katerine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.


My continuing, slow efforts at the theory of biography and autobiography took me back to the first Lejeune volume in English, On Autobiography (I've already made one post on the famous essay 'Le Pacte Autobiographique'). I re-read Paul John Eakin's 'foreword' to the volume and for the first time started to get something out of it. A brief report on only the first section (from my notes):

Eakins unpacks the issues of narrative in Lejeune's work as one sign of the divisions between "two Lejeunes" -- two sides of his personality (p. xi-xiii). One Lejeune praises innovation above all things, and so he idealized "a story without narrative" as something really special, but the other Lejeune is a "connoisseur" making fine distinctions among very typically plotted autobiographies. Eakins continues directing us towards Lejeune's personality when he points out how Lejeune perhaps naively bracketed a firm concept of 'sincerity' in his work, but that it was this attention to the necessary modeling of the reader's response that makes Lejeune's theory more representative of the 'self' as we continue to consider it, despite the more contemporary theoretical notion that the 'self' is a fiction:

To read autobiography in the manner of Lejeune, one must be both sophisticated, alive to its imaginative art, and naive, believing in the sincerity of the author's intention to present the story of "a real person concerning his own existence" (p. xiii, quoting p. 4 of the translation)....The interest of Lejeune's position resides in his willingness to concede the fictive status of the self and then to proceed with its functioning as experiential fact (xv).

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When "I" Was Born: conclusion

Wang's conclusion re-affirms her commitment to considering autobiography as a tool for identity formation and not as a form of historical writing. More than once, Wang attempts to take autobiography down from its place among the collections of facts and truths that we normally think of as history. Back in the introduction, we have seen her state categorically that "published facts have little relevance in autobiography, and that the absence of historical exactitude does not hurt autobiography." In the conclusion we have, Autobiography is not about the truth of the lived experience; it is about the retrospection and interpretation of the experience as the writer is situated in her present moment in history and geopolitical location.

This reader would tentatively suggest that the position is too strong, for the simple reason that all historical writing is as contingent as autobiography: all historical writing is the product of the present moment of the author or authors, and all historical writing is the interpretation of the past rather than the past itself. If this contingency separates autobiography from "the truth of the lived experience," then all history is similarly so separated.

Be that as it may, clearly it is not Ms. Wang's point to say that autobiography has no value as historical writing. Several times throughout her book she refers to the concept of a "subjective truth," which accounts for the phenomenon in which an autobiographer may remember an event or a figure as a true one, but their memory and their tools for expressing the memory may yield an account that is not completely accurate. Wang is an apologist for these situations: "the autobiographer...must not be held accountable for 'factual errors.'"

Her point here, then, is not that autobiography is not a form of historical writing at all, even if at many points throughout the book she implies that she thinks this is the case. Rather, she means to emphasize that story of the emergence of this literary form in China has immense value for understanding how human identity is formed, for understanding how ways of being spread, change, and evolve. Quite correctly, she sees that this understanding has in the past been slighted by academic readers who only use autobiographies as historical resources, and nothing more.

The case of the women examined here is so fascinating because it shows that reading, writing, and passing on autobiographies to mass audiences was a crucially important part of the Chinese literary field beginning in the 1920s. Jing Wang's point is that when the new form was presented to Chinese audiences in translation in mass-market books and literary journals, women readers and women writers responded particularly strongly because so many of them were just then taking very active -- indeed, quite courageous -- steps to be something new, something their parents and local communities for the most part did not expect them to be: writers, teachers, and soldiers. They became professionals, working to gain their independence and break free of the all-too-universal conservative notion that women belonged only in the home as mothers and wives. For them and for their readers, the craft of autobiography was a crucial tool to motivate, to negotiate, and to explain how and why they did what they did. The significance of this coincidence of a new literary form and rapid social change goes far beyond the scope of Chinese women's literature; it is a phenomenon worth considering by any students of history.
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When "I" Was Born: intro and chapter 1

Jing M. Wang's new look at Chinese women's autobiography shows us that the genre emerged from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. In her "Introduction," she gives two basic motivations for the study: first, to combat the implicit hegemony of Western male privilege and so expand the sense of what autobiography is. A second, related motivation is Wang's sense that in critical examinations of modern Chinese women's literature, all too often "fiction overshadows autobiography." To Wang, this "shadow" is completely unjustified: "The light of these texts shone out to me from dusty shelves in libraries, urging me to bring them together as one tradition." To do so, Ms. Wang makes a major nod a/b studies, adapting Lejeune's definition of autobiography as a form to be distinguished from both fiction and historical writing and fiction. Unlike the fiction writer, the autobiographer intends to be a kind of true statement, but this should be a "subjective truth," and so "the autobiographer...must not be held accountable for 'factual errors.'"

Wang's chapter 1 lays the groundwork for her conception of Chinese women's autobiography as a unique genre emerging first in the 1920s by considering autobiography in the Chinese tradition in an extremely abbreviated fashion. Traditionally, biographical writing in China is a historical genre with strictly didactic functions, as we can see from the foundational biographies of Sima Qian and repeated endorsements of the tradition in critical writings by figures such as the eight-century historiographer Liu Zhiji and Liang Qichao, the great reformer of the early 20th century. Traditional Chinese historical biography crafts heroic lives to be model figures of moral rectitude; this historiography reaches extreme didactic ends in works like the Ming dynasty tradition of Biographies of Women (Lie nü zhuan), which "is filled with gory atrocities women inflicted on themselves to prove their sexual loyalty toward their husbands..." The dramatic forms of self destruction in these biographies figures well the generality that Jing M. Wang wishes to emphasize, which is that "for both women and men, the circle of the so-called self can be compared to a ripple stirred up by the dropping of a pebble into water: it multiplies, magnifies, and gradually extends and disappears into the body of water." This figure helps us understand why autobiographical writing in ancient China was most often considered only a supplement to larger works, was usually very short, and did not dwell on the interior workings of the author's mind.

There is, however, a counter-tradition to this tradition, one that is perhaps not emphasized strongly enough in this chapter. The most influential of all Chinese lyrics, the Encountering Sorrow (Li sao), has also been called China's first autobiography for its extended and allegorical investigations of the poet's state of mind. And as Ms. Wang perceptively outlines, the growth of funerary writing, especially epitaphs, as a independent genre offers a pathway for personal engagement with the self that was used by countless outstanding figures of the tradition, from Cao Pi to Ouyang Xiu. Wang even brings up important but seldom-mentioned members of the critical tradition of personal, private writing, including Liu Xie, Xu Shizheng, and Zhang Xuecheng.

This discussion is perhaps too brief to function as anything more than a first glance at the problem of autobiographical writing in traditional Chinese literature. Interested readers are referred by Wang herself to the still under-celebrated 1990 work Confucian's Progress by the late Professor Wu Pei-yi, for a fuller exposition on the issues. Still, Wang's generalizations about the tendency in traditional writing to focus the imaginative power away from the self-portrait and instead to the service of historical lesson-making are for the most part still accepted understandings of the milieu from which China's first generation of modernists, the generation of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, emerged. Liang's generation promoted fiction to a higher level in Chinese letters than ever before for the express purpose of reforming politics and society, but understood autobiography strictly as a form of biography, which in turn was strictly understood as a form of history. These traditional precepts first broke down under the pens of the May Fourth writers in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Especially significant was Hu Shi, who called for book-length autobiography as a genre which was literary and historical at once, and able to serve in the development of the Chinese sense of the individual. Also there was Yu Dafu, who perhaps more than any other writer of the May Fourth generation strove to answer the call for inwardly-turned exploration of the author's mind and memory in book-length autobiography. Wang identifies a few works from this period that illustrate well the new turn towards self-writing, including Shao Shunmei's introduction to Lu Yin's Autobiography (廬隱自傳),
in which Wang finds a "nudge" toward the concept of the "subjective truth" that effectively makes autobiography a historically-intended genre distinct from fiction. As is well-known, all of these writers were avid readers of Western literature, including Western autobiographies like Augustine's Confessions; Ms. Wang notes this and also finds as well a 1937 anthology from Commercial Press in Shanghai which proves that Chinese autobiographical writing was at the time considered alongside Western autobiography in translation even in the popular sphere.

As Wang argues, writers of the early May Fourth period tended to focus strongly on the growth and development of the individual, believing that individualism was a crucial ingredient of the more powerful and modern Western societies. But as the events of the late 1920s and 1930s brought deterioration of the Republic, the birth of a new collectivist politics in the new Communist Party, and finally a desperately violent war with Japan, individualism quickly declined. Prof. Wang demonstrates a recurring fascination with the fact that, despite the rapid uptake of new nationalist and collectivist themes in Chinese literature of the 1920s to the 1940s, there is a seemingly paradoxical emergence of autobiographical writing by women during this same period. Professor Wang's goal is to explain how this happened. As the reader finishes chapter 1 and prepares to begin chapter 2, he or she is given to understand that the resolution to the apparent paradox lies in the quickly advancing social and political status of women in China. New roles like teaching and writing are available to a small but quickly growing proportion of Chinese women by the 1920s, and these roles call on women to turn away, at least partly, from their old roles as mothers and wives, as agents of private and domestic spaces; these "new women" firmly occupy the new and exciting public sphere. It makes sense, in a general way, that these women will create literary explorations of all these new ways of being, that they will turn to their own experiences for an honest, earnest look at these new identities, and that they will not see these autobiographies as anything less than fully serving the creation of a new, defensible and modern Chinese nation.
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