Writing Green Snake, Dancing White Snake, and the Cultural Revolution as Memory and Imagination --Centered on Yan Geling＇s Baishe

Following Kenneth King＇s pioneering transmedial synthetic writings on post-modern dance practices and Kimerer L. LaMothe＇s call for dance to be treated seriously in religious and philosophical discourses, I examine Yan Geling＇s novella Baishe （White Snake, 1998）, in relation to Lilian Lee＇s novel qingshe （Green Snake, 1986-93）, with a focus on how dancing and writing function literally, metaphorically, dialectically, and reciprocally, in these narratives. In my textual and contextual analyses of Yan＇s White Snake text, I borrow Daria Halprin＇s therapeutic model for accessing life experiences through the body in motion. I argue that, through a creative use of writing and dancing as key metaphors for identity formation and transformation, Yan＇s text, in the context of contemporary China, offers innovative counter-narratives of gender, writing, and the body. Yan＇s White Snake is considered in the following three contexts in this paper： firstly, the expressiveness of the female body in the White Snake story; secondly, the tradition and significance of writing women in Chinese literary history; and thirdly, the development of dance as a profession in the PRC, with a real-life snake dancer at the center. These three different frameworks weave an intricate tapestry that reveals the dialectics of writing and dancing, and language and the body, throughout the latter half of twentieth-century China. Furthermore, Yan＇s text foregrounds the Cultural Revolution as an important chronotope for experimentation with a range of complex gender identities in relation to the expressive and symbolic powers of dancing and writing.

A Short Essay on the Leftspeak during China's Cultural Revolution

This paper tries to show in what ways China’s Cultural Revolution affected the use of the Chinese language. It will quote expressions and catch-phrases of the time and dissect them from the lexical, semantic and pragmatic points of view, always bearing in mind the con-

The Machiavellian, the Philistine, the Romantic： Rereading Human, Ah, Human!

Within the few years of its first publication in 1980＇ Dai Houying＇s most popular and controversial novel Human, Ah, Human! drew significant attention from literary scholars throughout Chinese and English world and was often interpreted by the liberal humanist discourse as the representative work of the ＂thaw literature＂ or as the plea to revive the ＂human.＂ Recently, such appropriations of the notions of ＂the human＂ have raised suspicions among some critics both from the Beijing-based ＂revisiting the 1980s （重返八十年代） group＂ and some Western critical scholars, who begin to reevaluate Marxist humanism in the 1980s China. This paper, however, attempts to utilize several post-humanist critical theories that have been persistently on guard against the theoretical limits of both liberal and Marxist humanism to reinterpret this novel. Here, the novel Human, Ah! Human, is able to encompass both the contradiction and reconciliation of various kinds of ＂human＂ voices. This paper will revisit its theatrical setting where the newborn ＂human＂ figures encounter and contend with one another. Rather than the sudden emergence of a humanist hero, or a Marxist humanist hero, it is the encounter of the Machiavellian wild individual, the philistines who pursue earthly happiness, and the romantics, that offer the untrodden path to approach the historical ＂real.＂ This paper will exhibit their combinations, permutation, and rehearsal in the fictional structure.