The Modernity of Chinese Postmodern Literature

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038965

DOI 10.3726/b16050

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About the author

Alberto Castelli is Associate Professor of Literature at Hainan University, China. He holds various academic degrees, among them a master’s in Latin American literature and a master’s in Chinese philosophy. He obtained his PhD at La Sapienza University, Rome. In 2015 he was awarded a financial grant from the Chinese Postdoctoral Science Foundation and in 2019 a research grant from Hainan University. His research interests include comparative literature and particularly comparative studies of Chinese and Western (post)modern literatures. Castelli’s publications include “The Disenchantment of History and the Tragic Consciousness of Chinese Postmodernity” in Comparative Literature and Culture 21.4 (2019).

About the book

The Modernity of Chinese Postmodern Literature is an unprecedented comparative study of postmodern Chinese literature and continental European modernism. This book deconstructs and reconstructs central works of post-1976 Chinese literature and the main texts of European modernism to uncover a striking conceptual similarity between these two literary corpuses. Scholars and postgraduate students in the humanities comprise this work’s primary audience. However, all those interested in contemporary China will find in it an accessible key to decode China’s present and past.

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List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments and Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

PART I: The Twentieth Century: An Intellectual Portrait

1 The Downfall of Positivism

1.1 The Impasse of Modernity

1.2 The Problem of Modernity

1.3 The Age of Decadence: Nietzsche, Pirandello, and Simmel

1.3.1 Decadence as Morality: Nietzsche

1.3.2 Decadence as Relativity: Pirandello

1.3.3 Decadence as Blasé: Simmel

2 The Aesthetic of Modernity

2.1 The Limit of Reason

2.2 Modernist Novel

2.3 Fragmentation and Identity

2.4 Expressionist Modernity

3 The Bay of Postmodernism

3.1 What Is Postmodernism?

3.2 Postmodernist Expressions

3.3 The Narrative of Chaos

PART II: Post-Ideology China

4 The Matrix of Chinese Identity

4.1 Between Identity and Acculturation

4.2 Ideological Vacuum

4.3 The Teleology of Modernization

5 Post-Ideology Literature

5.1 New Era: The Cultural Discussion

5.2 Alienation vs. Humanism

5.3 Scar Literature

5.3.1 Abandoned Subjectivity

5.3.2 The Absurd

5.3.3 Realism

5.4 Roots-Searching Literature

6 Post-New Era

6.1 Postmodern Labyrinth

6.2 Postmodern Literature

6.2.1 Avant-Garde

6.2.2 Post-Ideology Realism

6.2.3 New Historical Fiction

PART III: A Tale of Decadence

7 Structure of Feelings

7.1 Collective Loneliness

7.2 The Aesthetic of Individualism

7.3 Historical Nostalgia

8 Epilogue

8.1 The Gravity of History

8.2 Post-Ideology Challenges

8.3 Deconstruction, Silence, and Decadence

Chinese Characters List

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1: Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House, Philadelphia, 1950.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)

Figure 2: Philip Johnson, The Chrystal Cathedral, California, 2007.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. Arnold C.)

Figure 3: Le Corbusier: United Nations Headquarters, New York, 1952.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. Neptuul.)

Figure 4: Le Corbusier: Secretariat building, Chandigarh, India, 1953.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. Sanyam Bagha.)

Figure 5: Pruitt-Igoe, U.S., Missouri, St. Louis, 1954.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)

Figure 6: Pruitt-Igoe, U.S., Missouri, St. Louis, 1972.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)

Figure 7: The SIS Building, London, 1994.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons. Laurie Nevay.)

Figure 8: Gunduz Aghayev, Elmar Huseynov and son embracing in Heaven, 2015.
(Source: Reproduced with permission of Gunduz Aghayev.)

Figure 9: Gunduz Aghayev, Nagasaki brothers on the beach, 2015.
(Source: Reproduced with permission of Gunduz Aghayev.)

Figure 10: Gunduz Aghayev, Young girls with scarecrows, 2015.
(Source: Reproduced with permission of Gunduz Aghayev.)

Acknowledgments and Preface

My interest in literature began two decades ago, when I first read Goethe’s Faust, albeit without quite understanding it at the time. The study of Chinese contemporary literature developed from my engagement in Chinese cultural discourse some five years ago, and this work holds both of these elements. It is neither a critical review nor an anthology, in that it does not have the precision of a detailed analysis nor the deep understanding that may lead to its generalization. Furthermore, I am less interested in painting detailed accounts and broad strokes than in depicting circuits of continuity between antagonist histories; thus, the project is an alternative view of the past and the present, focusing on the interpretative cruxes of Western European modernism and Chinese’s literary postmodernism.

Ideally, methodologically pure scholarship is disinterested; the aim of any scholar should be to provide the tools necessary to distinguish right from wrong, rather than stating what is right and wrong. I tried to do so, but I made no attempt to be objective, as I am well aware that every research is spoiled by the values of who is behind it, in which case the outcome is a partial and temporary point of view that, as a magnifying glass, enlarges details of understanding. Organic life defeats analysis, and history cannot be grasped in its totality, but it is a ←xiii | xiv→construction limited to the data at one’s disposal—and to the intelligence working on it. The twentieth century has yet to be solved, but Chinese dynamics of the past forty years are too complex and contradictory to be understood completely. This does not mean that China is beyond our understanding; it simply presumes we need to isolate a framework of reality and proceed inductively toward the whole. In my case, that would be Chinese postmodernism, a partial expression of Chinese postmodernity.