China Perspective Issues
Yinde Zhang
Yinde Zhang is a professor of Chinese studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, where he is also senior researcher of the Centre for comparative research studies and a member of the Centre for the study of modern and contemporary China (EHESS/CNRS). His own research is in the field of contemporary Chinese literature and Sino-Western relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Song Geng (ed), Quanqiuhua yu "Zhongguoxing" - Dangdai wenhua de houzhimin jiedu (Globalization and "Chineseness": Postcolonial readings of contemporary culture)
Qian Liqun, Jujue yiwang: “1957 nian xue” yanjiu biji (Refusal to forget: Notes for “1957 studies”)
The Fiction of Living Beings: Man and Animal in the Work of Mo Yan
La fiction du vivant : l’homme et l’animal chez Mo Yan
Gao Xingjian: Fiction and Forbidden Memory
From Soul Mountain to One Man’s Bible, Gao Xingjian’s fiction is committed to a labour of transgressive remembering: excavating minority heritages eclipsed by the dominant culture, protecting individual memory from established historiography, and sounding the dark areas of personal memory, less to indulge in “repentance” than to examine identity. The writing of memory, thanks to fictionalisation, thus comes to resemble an exorcism that makes it possible to defy prohibitions by casting out external and internal demons and by imposing the existential prescription against normative judgement.
Book Reviews (PDF version)
Lu Xun, Nouvelles et poèmes en prose (Short Stories and Prose Poems), translated and edited by Sebastian Veg
Book Reviews (PDF version)
Jeffrey C. Kinkley, Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels
The (bio)political novel: some reflections on Frogs by Mo Yan
Abstract: The political concerns underlying Mo Yan’s creative work come to the fore in his latest novel, Frogs (Wa), which gives the reader an unusual perspective on the complex relations between fiction and politics. This novel harshly criticises a state whose coercive population control policies are responsible for some murderous consequences. This denunciation is also aimed at the economic ultraliberalism that is complicit with the totalitarian inheritance because of its destruction of human dignity through the alienation and commercialisation of the body. The complex symbolic structure of this work brings out the need for life itself to be rehabilitated in accordance with basic human rights and membership in the human community, and to be strongly defended against political attack and moral decay. Far from being an essentialist communitarian ethics, however, the bioethics proposed by the author offers the possibility of social reconstruction of the bios.
Keywords: Mo Yan, Frogs (Wa 蛙), the (bio)political novel