Feminism note: Literary Feminism?

Cast photo from a recent production of "Making Lies from Truth" (Nong zhen cheng jia) by Yang Jiang; from this page

Dooling, Amy. Women's Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

After reading the long introduction to this book, I'm troubled once again by "feminist literary theory." Let me try to state the idea behind this big term very simply: literature ought to represent females in such a way as to highlight the need for feminist consciousness and feminist transformation. The resulting "feminist narrative" will either portray traditional patriarchal society negatively, which highlights the need for change, or it will portray female subjects who contribute substantially to the change, either simply because they understand the problems women face or because they come up with ways to actually change society.

I'm almost on board with this feminist project, though I'm troubled by the following: there is a strong 'ought' to feminist narrative, a kind of demand as to what needs to happen in literature. There seems to be some conflict between the demand for feminist narrative and the analysis of "agency" in women's literature. Feminists both look for agency and try to push what they know of agency onto the text, which I think is why they tend to undervalue the simple application of traditions and conventions in their literature. And since the literary quality of a text is partly reflected in its dense network of interactions with writing tradition, literary quality, too, is undervalued.

In my own terms, feminist literary criticism doesn't, at least here in Dooling, express any overlap between "agency" and "affect." Companionate marriage, for example, is a kind of primary affective connection that allows for agency in both parties -- that's what "companion" means, right? And this kind of relationship can arise in Chinese writing as a reinvention (Dooling's word would be "rewrite") of conventions, including Confucian convention. The difference I seem to have is perhaps slight: I say a 'rewrite' can have less parody and critique than feminists normally look for, at least until they begin considering middlebrow literature perhaps, which field forces them to consider how literature works on readers who won't accept challenges that raise their levels of anxiety and ambivalence. People want happy endings.

More on this in my dissertation to come.
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Back to the Blog, Back to School

Yep, that's how I feel; thanks artist Tom Richmond

It's the first day of school at the University of Minnesota. I'm always so nervous!

Huichung, Emily Chua. “The Good Book and the Good Life: Bestselling Biographies in China’s Economic Reform.” The China Quarterly, 198 (2009): 364-380.

Here's a source that AW recommended; it will surely come up in my next chapter, on the phenomenon of progressive humanism as a mass intimate public in contemporary Chinese culture. Huichung doesn't identify this intimate public, but she describes the larger field of Chinese publishing that surrounds bestselling biographies as one in which old stories take on new market orientations. She calls it a mutually generative relationship between revolutionary ambitions and commercial enterprise, but I'm not convinced this describes Yang Jiang's work effectively. Unlike Yao Ming's biography, for example, Yang Jiang never seems to think wealth or industry are important, and unlike Wang Meng, she only rarely uses the discourse of the nation, particularly in its intimate form which Huichung spots in the term "aiguo xin" (the patriotic heart).
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Mindmap reading: Leo Ou-fan Lee

August 23, Chapter 3 in formation after reading Leo Ou-fan Lee's article "On the Margins of the Chinese Discourse" (1991)

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. "On the Margins of the Chinese Discourse: Some Personal Thoughts on the Cultural Meaning of the Periphery." Daedalus 120.2, The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Spring, 1991): 207-226.

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Inspectional Reading: Affect and Emotional Exhaustion

I hope the model had fun posing for this photo I found at this page, which also reports that it can happen to anybody (studies were done!).

This blog by psychology researchers at the University of Sheffield awakens me to the value of scholarly research blogs in inspectional reading. In this entry, we can quickly learn two key terms: "interpersonal affect regulation," or trying to change someone else's feelings, and "intrapersonal affect regulation," or changing one's own feelings.

The researcher's main proposition here is that these affective actions exhaust the subject, which she suspects may have something to do with blood sugar -- emotional work is real work, apparently. I don't know that this proposition would be useful to me, but I am tempted to ask whether "interpersonal affect regulation," represented in literary texts, has some power on the reader. Thus I have a glimpse of how to connect affect to reader response theory.

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Inspectional Reading: Affect in Sociology

"Affect" happening live, online?

Jarrett, Kylie. "Labour of Love: An Archaeology of Affect as Power in E-Commerce." Journal of Sociology 39.4 (2003): 335-351

I need to understand exactly what "affect" means if it is to be the keyword of my entire dissertation, so it will have to be the subject of a set of inspectional readings. The big difference that I am putting into inspectional reading this time around is that it must feed directly into real writing, right away.

Sociological studies of affect seem to me to be useful especially in two main sections of my dissertation:

Chapter 1, section 1, "Affect in Chinese Literature"
{identity, symbolic capital, are social relationships always emotional?}
Chapter 4, section 1, "The Role of Affect in Intimate Publics"
{defining "middlebrow" literature, new (online especially) venues for the expression of social identity, user-response reveal the self-interested consumer, the readership as a community, or overlapping communities: do they have power? do they give immaterial labor? is it an example of flexible consumption? What is the role of "love," "goodwill" for the genre? Do they repudiate something? Do they embrace something?}

Here, Jarrett's article argues that social movements, a spirit of volunteerism that resulted from social movements, transformations of the Fordist economy into an economy full of "flexible consumers," and the value given to community among online consumers all work to produce e-commerce consumers "specifically as creatures of affect" with the power to produce creative content (like Amazon product reviews) and to shape production.

This argument has implications for the construction of "collective identity" (Fischer 1996, 181), the emergence of "network economies of scale" (Evans and Wurster, 1997/1999: 29, 2000: 15), modes of resistance to mass-marketing (Miller, 1998: 193, perhaps contra Baudrillard's model, 1981? also Harvey 1990), the productive power of affect (cf. Abercrombie 1991, esp. p. 177), the "love" of brands (Davidson 1992, 26-7, Klein 2001: 7) which leads to immaterial labor (Negri 1996,1999). Perhaps the new communities are a profound challenge to the class-bound identity?
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Back to Mindmaps

First Vision of Chapter 3, August 18

After a long break to participate in a conference and suffer generally from paralyzing anxiety, I'm back to writing.

My anxieties are numerous: I read too slow, I don't work hard enough, I'm not very good at abstract, syncretic thinking. But all of these weaknesses are ones that I can and should be working on. And I am, I think. It is very disappointing to see how little I accomplished this summer, but the only thing to be done, I suppose, is push on, and work harder.

My committee members were very disappointed with my writing, I think, and with good reason. The greatest weakness is that I presented little to no critical voice, and instead presumed to simply channel the voice of Yang Jiang -- this, of course, does not count for much academically. To fix the problem, I decided I needed to write a "treatment" of how the chapter would go and what it would accomplish. It turns out I had already written this "treatment" ; it's called a "prospectus." How stupid I was to have forgotten and ignored my own old writing!

Still, the new "treatment" is considerably more detailed and more sophisticated than the old "treatment." So there is that. And more importantly, this "treatment" ought to serve as a map for the rest of the chapter.

Time to get writing!

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Select your Passages, Dosie-doe

Torture of Intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, from here

Today I went back to an already-published translation of Yang Jiang's essay "The Years of the Horse and the Ram," going through all of it very carefully, selecting and typing up passages and ideas.

My reading of the essay will emphasize how Yang Jiang turns the experience of trauma into a story of growth and adaptation, from an escapist, 'helpless little lamb' to a combative, and (above all) intuitive explorer of the affective atmosphere of the early Cultural Revolution. In this narrative of overcoming we see Yang Jiang at first question who she even is, but soon she remembers her humanist values. I will present evidence from the theme of service that show how she continues to invoke one of her mother's values, and so partly continues to see herself as a 'good mother and worthy wife.' Because of the deep literary motif that occurs in this as in all her essays, we might call her 'good mother, worthy wife, and talent of the boudoir (caixiu).'

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PhD Progress: Ye Hanyin's MA

An example of the Chinese aesthetic of "all mixed in" (yunji): Xiao Huisong, "The Grace of Earth" (bronze), from this page

One of the things I have to do to get this writing project done is: read similar writing projects by previous students. This is a task that is always both interesting and painful, because I alternate between feeling in kinship with my fellow writers and in competition with them. I alternate between thinking their writing is much less incisive than mine and thinking that I can't possibly read as well or as much as they can.

That's normal, I'm guessing.

One graduate student thesis of great interest is from Taiwan, by a girl named Ye Hanyin. I'm very impressed in some ways by the thesis -- it takes on the full scope of Yang Jiang's writings, which ranges from drama to translation to fiction to essay, so there are a lot of bending the mind around to try to read some very disparate types of material. In other ways, of course, I don't see Hanyin's writing as having the same insights that I have had, and so she seems inferior. But at the end of the day I think I just like the virtual community created by having in my hands the words of someone else who spoke on the same thing I am speaking on.

A few notes on what I read today:

I'm going to be reading from Ye's three chapters on the essays of Yang Jiang. Today I read a small section from the first of these chapters called "The 'Invisibility'　Perspective for Creative Writing." "Invisibility" (yinshen) refers here to Yang Jiang's own self-description in the essay "The Cloak of Invisibility." But where my reading of the essay emphasizes that Yang Jiang wished to avoid ambition and take an "lowly and insignificant" place in society, and that this helps her to intuit what other people around her were thinking and feeling, Ye's take instead emphasizes the form of Yang Jiang's writing:

In her essays, we often cannot see the author’s own happiness, anger, sadness or sorrow, for she selects a cool, collected writing perspective. No matter what the theme, her laughs show no teeth, and her anger makes no sound.

Ye often describes this writing style as a kind of "distance," though it is one through which the reader can intuit the true feelings of the author:

But this writing distance by no means creates coldness, because even though the pieces document the facts objectively 客观地纪实, still we can see the sincerity of the author.

The representative example of this is in Yang Jiang's representation of suffering in life. She speaks of it simply, coldly. "He held my hand and said, 'That was the telephone. Your father is already dead.'" Ye (and, I remember now, others) praise such lines for the great affective force they have by keeping the pain held in reserve. The hint at what she must have really been feeling is enough to give us something which we feel is the truth, as Chinese readers. (Sorry for pronoun confusion -- I'm trying to identify as a Chinese reader.)

Now, here's sort of a random idea that I will try working into my dissertation chapter's conclusion tomorrow:

If we return to Stephen Owen’s Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, we can see that the idea of "latent" (yin, the prefix for yinshen, "invisible;" this is also a female-gendered) expression occurs in the 5th-century work Wen xin diao long (Literary writing and the carving of dragons). In chapter 40, Owen translate and explains the verse as an opposition between “latent” (yin) and “out-standing” (xiu)in poetic language. The “latent” is definied as “the layered significance beyond the text;” the term "beyond" here shows the special value to Liu Xie and his followers, that the "latent" indicates deeper truth; this truth is the affect (qing); it is the “truth” (yi) of the writing.

Developing the idea further, Sikong Tu’s eleventh “category of poetry” is the category “reserve” (hanxu) which praises the category by saying,

Though the words do not touch on oneself,
It is as if there were unbearable melancholy.
In this there is that ‘someone in control,’
Floating or sinking along with them.

(This sentiment has been applied to Yang Jiang many times, not only above, but in Hong Zicheng as well). Here, what remained a vague sense of affect as a mode or something in Liu Xie’s formulation is more clearly an affective subject.

Again, the representative example of this aesthetic form is the technique of reserving expression of unhappiness to encode the intensity of the unhappiness. As Owen says, "[U]nhappiness is revealed as the ground on which one speaks of something else.”(328)

Thus we get back to Ye, who used her section to point out that Yang Jiang gives us the feelings of unhappiness through reserve; or as I like to put it now, Yang Jiang writes so that we intuit the unhappiness there. The technique here is actually quite traditional, though Ye does not seem to know it. She does end her section with an important quote by someone named Chen Yali who has an article from 2002 about the "wisdom" in Yang Jiang's essays. The quote praises Yang Jiang's reserve (hanxu) using the very same term that Sikong Tu wrote about in the 9th century: “be reserved, mixing it all in; contained, and not exposed” 含蓄蕴籍、含而不露. This phrase can't possibly have started with Chen, and shows that somehow I've come round with two lines of thought to much the same place. More on how this works when I figure it out.

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Writing Target Completed

This is NOT Qian Zhongshu, dummy

As I re-read the essay "Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged," I'm struck how Yang Jiang's voice is directed very specifically at a popular readership that stubbornly seeks biographical details from novels. So what she does in this essay is actually give her audience lots of biographical details, just as they wished, but showing at the same time how much of the story is purely a creation. Characters and plot are based on reality, but not limited by reality. It's a very simple point, but remarkably, it needs to be said over and over again, and I know for a fact that it needs to be said in both Chinese and English reading cultures.

Tomorrow: start putting together my notes on this with the essays on Yang Jiang's childhood. What's the connection I'm looking for?
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Return to my Dissertation

Yang Jiang's family, 1927. This is the setting of the first part of my dissertation.

It's always so difficult for me to work on what I'm supposed to work on! But I'm back at last, to tackle my dissertation. This first section is intended for publication with Biography, though it has grown a bit too long, and it seems difficult to predict if it will get in or not. I definitely want someone to read it over for me before I submit.

Notes, bibliography and all, this article adds up to about 7,000 words. My goal is to flesh out the two remaining sections to the chapter in the next two weeks, 15,000 words a week, totally up 30,000 words, which I'll then edit down to a draft that ideally will be 10-15,000 words in length, for a total length to this chapter of some 20,000 words.
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Skrik!

Me today

Today I studiously avoided distractions, but as usual it feels like too little too late. I used the morning to scan half of the French dissertation on Yang Jiang's work, which doesn't look particularly useful but which I should have read through by now. I wrote a fair-ish paragraph introducing my subject and practicing for the AAS panel description I need to write, but I've lost the meaning of the thing. Once again I don't feel confident in the texts I want to study or with what I want to say about them. I'm at sea with my presentation for next Thursday. Sigh.

I did get through "Remembering My Third Aunt"again, and wrote a little bit about it, though the writing lacked soul for the most part. My chapter draft is a huge mess. Tomorrow I'll finish scanning the French dissertation and begin in earnest on the clean-up operation with this bit of writing. Oh, I wish I had given the writing to my teachers before I left for England!
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Public Sphere

Habermas, the philosopher of the moment

Writing today. Excruciating as it gets this close to presentation time.

Reading a bit too. Finally with the Habermas:

They already sprang from the needs of a bourgeois reading public that later on would find genuine satisfaction in the literary forms of the domestic drama and the psychological novel. For the experiences about which a public passionately concerned with itself sought agreement and enlightenment through the rational-critical public debate of private persons with one another flowed from the wellspring of a specific subjectivity.

Tomorrow: revise, supplement. Begin reading essay on Yang Jiang's aunt.
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Progressive Bourgeois

Seems Like Old Times

I only watched the first few minutes of this film before it became apparent that neither Goldie Hawn nor Charles Grodin, and least of all Chevy Chase, do anything that is remotely funny to me. Still, I might have continued to watch because this is the story of a progressive bourgeois family that serves to re-inscribe the rules for behaving in the public sphere by focusing closely on what we owe to each other in our home life.

Formulated this way, the film does much the same work that Yang Jiang's essays about her childhood in a progressive Confucian home where her father was a lawyer, her mother a housewife with a social conscience, and their home a kind of salon and half-way house where free expression and help for the disadvantaged were the main motives driving daily life.

But it was after all a bad film, which is why A. wouldn't consent to watch it through. Homework viewing, perhaps?
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Writing on my Own

Portrait of Modernity as an Old Man (Thanks, Tianya)

Productive day of writing on my own. I'll share a snippet of a portrait of Yang Jiang's Gatekeeper:

"I am the gatekeeper of the Yang household of Temple Lane. My name is Zhao Peirong. That's ‘Zhao’ 趙; ‘Zhao’ spelled with with a ‘xiao’ 肖 and a ‘zou’ 走.”
To this day his voice is still in my ears...He was in his fifties, thin, and of medium build. His back was slightly hunched, and his face was long and narrow. Hanging off the sides of his mouth was one of those mustaches in the shape of a ba 八, the strokes of the ba trailing off in a downward hang. He walked with the slow steps of an old person, or a scholar. When he spoke, his mouth always carried a certain smile, the lips pursed as if he were about to make an apology. And then he would always begin by saying "Zhege, zhege..." (this, this...), which with his Antown accent came out as "Guoge, shige..."

Tomorrow: finish "Remembering My Father," talk with SC, revising the Yang Bi essay.

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Retreat, Day 11 (The Last Day)

Center for Writing's Homepage

On my evaluation of the retreat, I said that I am now convinced of the value of "community, structure and support" for writing. And it's true. This will change the way I teach and think about writing, probably forever.

Early this morning, we were given the following questions in bold as our pre-writing assignment for the first day.

As I continue to complete my dissertation, I will need to address the following questions:

How do I get past being blocked? (Read. Write in a different voice, as if in an email to advisor. Mindmap away from the computer. Look at your prospectus and grant proposals. Look up other dissertations.)

How do I put in a good day, every day?

How do I hold on to good taste? How do I continue to love literature?

What do I mean by rigorous? What can I say about theory?

How do I gain firmer control over my impulses?

Mechanical steps I need to complete in order to finish:

I need to oil up my mind and practice running it in different gears: reading Chinese, translation, commentary, full expository writing, brainstorming, revising, reading English, notating, reviewing, outlining. Responding. Eyes on the final product, writing coming out all the time.

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Retreat 10

Old Lady Meng Handing out the Tea of Oblivion, reproduced in a book by Vera Schwarcz

I'm so sad that my retreat is almost over. I've gained a measure of discipline by working in this group, and in the meantime I have really gotten a glimpse at the scope of my dissertation, its limitations, and the work involved. It's all so emotional for me right now!

Today I began what I thought would be a short task of glossing over the preface to Yang Jiang's 1986 collection "About to Drink the Tea." I ended up writing a pretty nice piece that lays out the two main issues of interest in this preface, centered around the mythological motif of Old Lady Meng's Broth/Tea of Oblivion. It was the kind of researched, confident writing that comes with a central image - shown above - that I quite liked.

Later I went over part 1 of 7 of Yang Jiang's "Remembering My Father." I'm still very much daunted by this 50-plus page essay, but I'm convinced it deserves me as its first critical, literary reader in English. I made notes that are more readable than what I did for the essays in Memoires Decousus, but still its obvious I don't have much a thesis yet. It makes sense that I need to finish the essay next.

I began reading Chinese Reportage in earnest, again ashamed that I only sort of skimmed it before, not at all understanding its great value for my own work. I am correcting that now as I go over the text carefully. At first glance, Prof. Laughlin's own work seems to blow away mine because it takes on a wider scope of materials. However, I believe that I will be able to look at as many materials, though not of so great a scope. I need to proceed with a quick, intense reading of this book.

Overall, I'm feeling a bit better today.
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Retreat Day 9

Rachel Carson, who I read a little bit about today

I'm in a worse mood as my writing deadline slips away, my draft seems flimsy and in need of so much more reading, my prospects for getting published look dimmer, and my prospects for ever getting a job look nil.

The worst thing about all this is that it kills the desire to work. Luckily, one great thing about the dissertation retreat is that I know I'm not alone, and there is a palpable energy that comes from having these people working together with me.

I need to breathe, exercise a bit, and then think again. Tonight I'll translate a bit and read. Tomorrow I'll begin by reading 10 more pages of the long essay by Yang Jiang on her father. I'll print out the section I finished today (making the draft 2/9 done) and begin thinking about the way to compress and revise. I think I better bring the book Chinese Reportage with me as well and begin going through that in earnest.

...

Today I took a little time to read from the journal New Literary History. There was an article by Bonnie Foote that I came on by searching for "network theory." It turns out Foote came up with a wide-scope literary theory Foote calls the "interaction model" by thinking through ecocriticism. Suddenly I remembered that Zhao Baisheng said that was his new interest. New Fulbright app, anyone?

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Dissertation Day 8

Japanese Moving in on Suzhou, 1937

I'm feeling bad about myself again. This is just too damned hard, and I'm working far too slow. I'm less than 2/9 done with my chapter draft, which makes it nearly impossible to imagine myself finishing this up by the end of the week. I'll keep to that deadline though and just bite the bullet if I fail.

Next up, I need to bring the Yang Bi essay to its climactic close, and also read the essay "Remembering my Father."

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Retreat Day 7; Writing Now

The Crazy Monk, with pouty lips 嘴唇尖呀尖

At long last, after completing a really decent outline, I got some real writing done that I feel good about. I chose to approach my chapter beginning with the second of three sections that form the first of three parts to the body of my chapter. So I estimate I'm 1/9 done with the body. That's excruciatingly slow progress, much less than I'd hoped for this morning. But typical of my revised estimates. I wrote about 2,000 words, which is a fair amount for one day's worth of work, I think.

I got stuck at one point when I decided to translate a line describing an old gatekeeper in a big manor home of Suzhou in the 1910s and 1920s:

...when the maid came back from buying vegetables, she would sit in the gateway and ask him to write out the invoice. He had many novels with tiny, densely-packed lines of print, like The Story of Jigong, The Story of Judge Bao, and Tales of Yue. In his spare time he'd put on his reading glasses and just read and read.

I'm just so fascinated when I see information on people's reading, and use of reading as characterization really drives me wild. I took the time to sketch out what will be the longest footnote of this section:

[footnote to say Jigong 濟公傳 is a cultural hero who rights wrongs and helps others. See Meir Shahar, p. for the probable edition and evidence that links the Jigong stories to the Boxers. Judge Bao is a popular story character in Baogongji, a "pure official" who is not afraid to prosecute powerful villains even if they are kin to the emperor. See Idema. The Tales of Yue (Shuo Yue) concerns the military achievements of Yue Fei, a Chinese general who fought against Jurchen people, ancestors of the Manchus who invaded northern China and established a Jurchen Jin dynasty in the 11th century. See James T. C. Liu. "Yueh Fei (1103-41) and China's Heritage of Loyalty." The Journal of Asian Studies. Vol. 31, No. 2 (Feb., 1972), pp. 291-297. Incidentally, each of these fictionalized accounts of heroes are based on real individuals.]

Next up: my examination of the memorial essay for Yang Jiang's little sister Yang Bi.
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可惡可惡! An aborted fellowship application

Sometimes I feel like the incompetent king and the frustrated minister at the same time

Disappointment piles upon disappointment. It's Tuesday now but I still have not finished the latest translation gig, which has grown into something quite gargantuan indeed. One more post on it when I'm through. Other goals this week:

1. Apply for Fellowships (one proposal has already had to be aborted, unfortunately)


2. Finish Translating the Yang Jiang piece


3. Grade Student Outlines

Time until dissertation must be complete: 1 Year
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