As fewer and fewer Chinese recall or inquire into the violence and chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the hard and painful lessons learned about scapegoating and ideological zealotry may be slipping away. Because of the Chinese Communist Party’s deep involvement. in implementing the Cultural Revolution, it has discouraged searching investigations into this period, and ignored the pleas of esteemed writers like Ba Jin and Hsiao Chien to establish a museum that would preserve and display the artifacts from this tumultuous period for coming generations. The renowned writer and former Red Guard, Zheng Yi (1947- ), has countered this state inducement to cultural amnesia by meticulously documenting one of the worst atrocities of the Cultural Revolution: the rampant murder and cannibalizing of hundreds of innocent “class enemies” in Guangxi during the late 1960s. The literary investigation Zheng Yi smuggled out of the PRC and published in Taipei, Scarlet Memorial, is both a gripping documentary and a humanistic meditation on the origins and unfolding of this unsettling contemporary enactment of cannibalism, Lu Xun’s favorite metaphor for inhumane social traditions.

The purpose of this paper is to derive a cross-culture understanding of the basic literary forms by exploring their genesis and evolution in terms of psycho-historical theory of human development. By treating the literary mind of a cultural tradition as a macroperson, and by analyzing comparative data drawn from both Occidental and Oriental traditions, it locates a correlation between psychological theories of infantile development and the historical evolution of the most basic literary forms: poetry, drama, and fiction. Poetry satisfies the (un)conscious wish for oral gratification; drama gratifies the (un)conscious fantasy for primal scenes and the curiosity for the unknown; fiction fulfills the (un)conscious desire for individuation, dominance, and libidinal gratification. Having found the correlation, the paper establishes a developmental model of major literary forms in relation to the five stages of psychological maturation. Then, the paper further examines the developmental history of Chinese literary forms and finds that the Chinese tradition corresponds pretty well with the model. The paper concludes that the genesis and evolution of literary forms are not a random development, but are (un)consciously motivated by the psychological force of the collective literary mind.

The Great Mother concept existed in indigenous Chinese mythology and Taoist beliefs, and was later combined with the Buddhist bodhisattva ideal. The image of the Great Mother in China developed its own characteristics as a result of the adaptations to Chinese society and culture. This paper discusses some of these characteristics as represented in certain episodes of Water Margin, Marriage As Retribution, Awakening the World, and Dream of the Red Chamber. Although there was no solid evidence that matriarchy existed in ancient China, or that ordinary women directly exercised power in the public sphere, women were still influential and powerful in some realms of everyday life. Representations of the Great Mother in these three novels stress the maternal roles of nurturing and protection. The Great Mothers are also represented as “androgynous” and performing “paternal” roles in offering instruction, discipline, and even punishment. Besides functioning as paternal figures, they convey other knowledge about life on subjects such as love, procreation, sexual restraint, and the nourishing of life. They thus contribute to both nurture and culture. Embedded in the contexts of three novels which demonstrate ambivalence in their representation of women, the Great Mothers convey the authors’ conceptions of ideal womanhood, anxiety about their own identity and culture, and wishful thinking about a utopia generated the Great Mother.

This paper argues that Yu Dafu (1896-1945), a major Chinese writer, suffered from paranoiad jealousy in relation to his second wife during the Sino-Japanese War. Employing the psychoanalytic concepts of Melanie Klein and Sigmund Freud, the author finds that there are intimate connections between Dafu’s abnormal jealousy on the one hand, and the outbreak of the war, the death of the actual mother (as a result of the war), and Dafu’s frustrating infantile experiences on the other hand.

M. Butterfly ends with the death scene, the same as Madame Butterfly. It seems David Henry Hwang did not utterly deconstruct this opera. As a matter of fact, Hwang endows this scene with special significance. The tragic ending implies that to understand each other, make friends and peacefully live together, people both in the East and the West have to utilize negative dialectics to clear through the stereotypes produced time and again by the cultural industry (Adorno) and to combat misconceptions inscribed in Orientalism (Said). Without a doubt, Madame Butterfly is a Westerner’s wish-projection of an ideal Oriental woman (Kerr); the opera shows a sense of racial supremacy and imperialist mentality in that it describes how a submissive Oriental girl is bought by a cruel white man, loves him unconditionally, waits for him for a long time (three years) but is abandoned and then sacrifices her life for love. The relationship between the East and the West inevitably involves ideology and the desire of domination. Madame Butterfly, as a cultural product, tends to perpetuate the misconceptions it contains and to feminize the Orient as the opera has been performed repeatedly for nearly a century. M. Butterfly shows up as a countering play, which, in a sense, tries to break through these misunderstandings even though it takes the risk of giving the audience an opposite and cunning image of the “inscrutable Oriental.” It, however, constructively enlightens us to get out of the prison of false ideas and to avoid a tragic ending.

In this interview conducted by the Chinese translator of Representations of the Intellectual, Said talks about the role of the intellectual, his long-term concern with the issue of representation, the four periods of his own intellectual career, his disagreement with mainstream European critics such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Raymond Williams, his relationship to post-colonial critics and writers, the two main strands of his key ideas, and the paradoxical role of being an influential critic inside and out of the academy on the one hand and an exile and cultural outsider on the other.