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The
Story of Stone
From the Publisher
In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in
the Chinese tradition--all concerning stones endowed with magical
properties--Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient
Chinese stone lore. Wang's thorough and systematic comparison of these
classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story
and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese
literature.
High
Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng’s China
Book Description
Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the
1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown
in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent
take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary
era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.
In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics
that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese
Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines
the various schools of thoughtLi Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction
of Confucianism, the neo- Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment
Schoolthat came into play in the Culture Fever. She also critiques
the controversial mini-series Yellow River Elegy. In mapping out China's
post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism,"
refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism,"
and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s. This book
delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals,
writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper
understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.
China's
Avant-Garde Fiction
Card catalog
description
Filled with mirages, hallucinations, myths, mental puzzles, and the
fantastic, the contemporary experimental fiction of the Chinese avant-garde
represents a genre of storytelling unlike any other. Whether engaging
the worn spectacle of history, expressing seemingly unmotivated violence,
or reinventing outlandish Tibetan myths, these stories are defined
by their devotion to theatrics and their willful apathy toward everything
held sacred by the generation that witnessed the Cultural Revolution.
Jing Wang has selected provocative examples of this new school of
writing, which gained prominence in the late 1980s. Contradicting
many long-cherished beliefs about Chinese writers - including the
alleged tradition of writing as a political act against authoritarianism
- these stories make a dramatic break from conventions of modern Chinese
literature by demonstrating an irreverence toward history and culture
and by celebrating the artificiality of storytelling. Enriched by
the work of a distinguished group of translators, this collection
presents an aesthetic experience that may have outraged many revolutionary-minded
readers in China, but one that also occupies an important place in
the canon of Chinese literature.
Cinema
and Desire
Book Description
Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China's most influential theoreticians
and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist, her literary, film and TV
commentary has, over the last decade, addressed an expanding audience
in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Cinema and Desire presents Dai Jinhua's
best work to date. In the book she examines the Orientalism that made
Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, establishes
Huang Shuqin's Human, Woman, Demon as the People's Republic's first
genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese
diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an
icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyses the rise of shopping
plazas in 1990s urban China as a strange montage in which the political
memories of Tiananmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist
marketplace are intertwined.
Chinese
Popular Culture and the State
Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Dai Jinhua, Judith Farquhar, David
S. G. Goodman, James L. Hevia, Li Hsiaoti, Ralph Litzinger, Eric Kit-Wa
Ma, Jonathan Scott Noble, Jing Wang
The State Question in Chinese Popular Culture presents a series of
groundbreaking essays that challenge the paradigm dividing Chinese
culture into "official" and "unofficial" categories.
This binary, which mirrors the "high/low" dichotomy familiar
to all practitioners of cultural studies, finds its roots in Cold-War
Western romanticization of a Chinese popular culture that stood in
defiant opposition to the Communist state. This special issue disputes
such simplistic representations and offers new critical trajectories
crucial to the study of contemporary Chinese popular culture
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