"Make the past serve the present!"Thus goes Mao Zedong's slogan on how to appropriate the ancient in revolutionary times.In my previous studies,I have argued that the Chinese writers,engagement with the ..."Make the past serve the present!"Thus goes Mao Zedong's slogan on how to appropriate the ancient in revolutionary times.In my previous studies,I have argued that the Chinese writers,engagement with the an cient gave rise to a platform of"necessary anachronism"in cultural transformation.This new project carries further this argument and draws attention to the transmediality in the leftist historical imagination.From the 1940s through the 1970s,the revolutionary representations of the ancient were simultaneously poetic,theatrical,intellectual,and cinematic,to say nothing about the calligraphic and visual adaptations they elicited.This current of reinventing the ancient man tested itself in the historical drama in wartime China and found a coda in the anti-colonial leftist cinematic adaptation of the historical play Qu Yuan in 1970s Hong Kong.Starting with a broader theoret:ical intervention into the issue of media,this paper emphasizes that the transmedial reinterpretation of the ancient in fact formed a mode of mediaUon between revolution and history,between politics and aesthetics.In the cultural regime of China's long revolution,the transference or translation of the allegorical-anachronistic energies among different media was a key site of signification,contestation,and crisis.展开更多
This paper examines the performance significance of Lu Xun's historical short stories collected in Gushi xinbian(Old stories retold,1936)by focusing on the mediality of his idiosyncratic writing,which he himself c...This paper examines the performance significance of Lu Xun's historical short stories collected in Gushi xinbian(Old stories retold,1936)by focusing on the mediality of his idiosyncratic writing,which he himself called"facetious."It revisits the young Lu Xun's uneasy en gageme nt with medical science as student documented in his lecture notebooks bearing corrections by his teacher as well as his early essays?This provides an analytical framework for discussing the stakes of his historical fiction as a critique of the discourse of scientific historiography which was increasingly gaining currency in May Fourth China.Lu Xun's historical fiction is conspicuously not meant to function as a stable medium between the past and the present but betrays its opaque and even arbitrary mediality,which disrupts identity in historical representation and thus critiqques ideological,"cultural"power inherent in scientific discourse that tries to establish that identity.The paper then reads Gushi xinbian as attempts at recovering history from such power and envisioning new possibilities of historical transmission in the midst of an aporetic search of a prehistory of Chinese modernity—attempts hinged on anachronistic textual moments whose meanings circulate in defiance of any identity of time with itself,thereby bespeaking an alternative power to"make"history.展开更多
文摘"Make the past serve the present!"Thus goes Mao Zedong's slogan on how to appropriate the ancient in revolutionary times.In my previous studies,I have argued that the Chinese writers,engagement with the an cient gave rise to a platform of"necessary anachronism"in cultural transformation.This new project carries further this argument and draws attention to the transmediality in the leftist historical imagination.From the 1940s through the 1970s,the revolutionary representations of the ancient were simultaneously poetic,theatrical,intellectual,and cinematic,to say nothing about the calligraphic and visual adaptations they elicited.This current of reinventing the ancient man tested itself in the historical drama in wartime China and found a coda in the anti-colonial leftist cinematic adaptation of the historical play Qu Yuan in 1970s Hong Kong.Starting with a broader theoret:ical intervention into the issue of media,this paper emphasizes that the transmedial reinterpretation of the ancient in fact formed a mode of mediaUon between revolution and history,between politics and aesthetics.In the cultural regime of China's long revolution,the transference or translation of the allegorical-anachronistic energies among different media was a key site of signification,contestation,and crisis.
文摘This paper examines the performance significance of Lu Xun's historical short stories collected in Gushi xinbian(Old stories retold,1936)by focusing on the mediality of his idiosyncratic writing,which he himself called"facetious."It revisits the young Lu Xun's uneasy en gageme nt with medical science as student documented in his lecture notebooks bearing corrections by his teacher as well as his early essays?This provides an analytical framework for discussing the stakes of his historical fiction as a critique of the discourse of scientific historiography which was increasingly gaining currency in May Fourth China.Lu Xun's historical fiction is conspicuously not meant to function as a stable medium between the past and the present but betrays its opaque and even arbitrary mediality,which disrupts identity in historical representation and thus critiqques ideological,"cultural"power inherent in scientific discourse that tries to establish that identity.The paper then reads Gushi xinbian as attempts at recovering history from such power and envisioning new possibilities of historical transmission in the midst of an aporetic search of a prehistory of Chinese modernity—attempts hinged on anachronistic textual moments whose meanings circulate in defiance of any identity of time with itself,thereby bespeaking an alternative power to"make"history.
