The author’s current research project is an inquiry into Frank Chin’s strategy of a cognitive remapping of American’s racial formation in order to find the weak link where pro-democratic forces can attack. The author's critical stance toward this strategy is clear: We can raise the questions that Chin has tried to narrativize: Is “racist love” now eliminated by this new phenomenon of performative, not normative or even “accidental” Asians? Or are those now gifted with exorbitant amounts of symbolic capital still compelled to traverse a Gunga Din Highway filled with supermalls, reproducing an exchangeable use-value at the service of global capitalism? These are questions that Chin has attempted to answer and that Chinese as well as other Asian writers will have to respond to in the next millennium for the sake of much more worthy ideals.

The end of the twentieth century has witnessed a strong fascination with cannibalism in literature, film, and cultural studies, particularly in the West. Postcolonial theorists argue that cannibalism is a myth which expresses Western cultural biases, a myth created by European imperialists to justify their colonizing ambitions. Since they do not believe that cannibals existed, these theorists turn to dismantle ethnohistorical accounts and anthropological studies of cannibalism and claim they are false. These critics also adopt a rather dogmatic paradigm: the colonialists have political power and dominance, and thus they can control and exploit those colonized “others.” This paper argues that we need to be cautious about applying these theories to China. These theories have limited use in discussing the portrayals of cannibalism by modern writers such as Lu Xun, Wang Jingzhi, Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Zheng Yi, and Liu Zhenyun. A close analysis of Liu Zhenyun’s “Reminiscing 1942” (1993) in fact reveals that the author reverses the postcolonialist paradigm: instead of condemning the “imperialists,” he implies that under certain circumStances some Chinese people would rather be colonized by Western or Japanese “imperialists” than be controlled by their erratic authoritarian government.

“Mandarin Duck and Butterfly Literature” and other pejorative terms coined by May Fourth iconoclasts have tended to obscure the major differences between works of 20th-century Chinese popular fiction. Along with switching to less dismissive terms such as tongsu xiaoshuo, critics can underline the dynamism of this body of writings by linking its close connection to serial publication in newspaper literary supplements [fukan]. The diversity of popular fiction may be illustrated by categorizing works along a spectrum of possibilities in four quadrants, from an idealistic tenor at one end of the horizontal spectrum to a cynical tone at the other, and from a strongly traditional Chinese aesthetic structure at one end of the vertical spectrum to a Western or other foreign aesthetic structure at the other. This paper argues that the combination of idealism and a traditional aesthetic has tended to be the strongest current of this century’s popular fiction, and is common among writers as far apart in time and sensibility as Zhang Henshui and Jin Yong. However, the detective fiction of Sun Liaohong and many others is strongly Western in its aesthetic while tending towards idealism in tone, except among a relatively small contingent of hardboiled crime novelists. Eileen Chang’s domestic novels about embittered wives are quite traditional aesthetically and yet strongly ironic or even cynical in tone. In contrast, contemporary popular fiction by writers such as Wang Chen-ho often leans strongly toward the poles of both Western aesthetics and cynicism in tone.

This article makes a comparison between Tu Fu as the most canonical of Chinese classical poets, the one most taken up as a national poet, and Dante, who has the same status in Italian culture. Tu Fu and Dante are both political poets, and both religious, both suffered forms of near-exile, or exclusion, both lived in times which have been seen as the most highly cultured within their countries, so much so that the notion of a “Renaissance” can be applied to the times of both. Yet that said, is there any point in comparing two poets so different in their cultural contexts, and where the similarities might be said to be coincidences only? Can there be any way of reading such different poets without the textual approaches being merely formalistic? The article tries to face this and related problems face-on, and is informed by an approach which tries to historicize, and to read a text with an awareness of a possible cultural and political unconscious. The approach is, of necessity, Western in terms of its training in reading texts, and acknowledges that it can only approach Tu Fu through comparative translation. Nonetheless, it looks first of all at the two poets, giving an introduction to both for the benefit of those who know only one, and comparing Florence with Xiian and the European Renaissance with the Tu Fu’s T’ang. It suggests some points of contact, and tries to ask what the problems are in reading either poet in terms of their cultural difference not only from each other but from us: we are neither of Dante’s Italy nor of Tu Fu’s China, and the problem of how to read either text in relation to our own modernity can be usefully addressed by comparing the alterity of one with the alterity of the other. Comparisons are made between the use of both poets by a later literary tradition to establish a national sense, and a national history. In particular the theme of the exile, the politician who has been displaced and the loss of home and family are compared; the article looks at the role of nostalgia and melancholia in both, and by a sustained reading of Tu Fu’s “Autumn Meditation” approaches the question of how the writers look at the issue of loss. At that point, use is made of William Empson’s seventh type of ambiguity, which invokes Freud, and the notion that the text might say the opposite of what it seemed to say on the surface, and the question is asked about Dante’s reaction to the loss of everything dear to him, as this is discussed in “Paradiso” canto 17, and Tu Fu’s ability to deal with emotions. This leads into the question of how both poets regarded the issue of personal subjectivity, whether it was a concept that either of them could understand, and the sense that it is impossible to read a text of a tradition that the present only partly understands leads to a sense of the difficulty of reading in another culture, though indicating that the attempt must be made.

An important polarity in the Chinese mind and world is that of wen 文 and wu 武 . Wen suggests pattern, culture, the literary, the civil; wu suggests vigor, action, the martial. Although in principle there is a recognition of the need for the balance and harmony of these qualities, in actuality the Chinese tradition is one in which wen has dominated, with a distinct tension between the two forces. This paper will review various attitudes and approaches towards wen and wu as depicted in T’ang fiction. The genre of T’ang fiction is a particularly revealing and fascinating forum because of its personal and informal nature. While at the political level the opposition of wen and wu may involve foreign policy decisions, in fiction it may express concern with the question of who wins the girl, a man of wen or a man of wu. In fiction one will find a number of attitudes towards wu expressed by the wen-jen at 文人, the authors of these tales. In addition to the expected dominance of wen over wu, there is also a defense and celebration of, retreat to and even a longing for wu, as well as attempts to work out a sort of order and balance. This study focuses particularly upon stories in which there occurs a triangle: a wen-jen, a wu-figure and a heroine. The pattern can be employed in several ways, but in general the appearance of the wu-figure acts as a counter-balance to the wen-figure. These T'ang stories express fundamental insights into the nature and place of wen and wu in society, as well as an awareness of their relative strengths and weaknesses.

One of the salient features of Zhang Tianyi’s art is a series of paradigms of repetition in the narrative. Repetition can be viewed as a manifold effort to make a point or to create an effect, and it is also a device to regulate material and to generate meanings in a certain designated way. As a result, the intrinsic being will emerge. This article demonstrates how repetition can transform stereotypes by means of rhetorical subtleties of literary utterance so as to progressively generate or diffuse tensions in the text. It examines the play of repetition and signification by exploring the theoretical implications of essential linkages between seemingly separated or isolated parts in Zhang’s narrative. Various roles and modes of repetition are identified such as effacement, replacement and so on. What is apparently ephemeral may be perpetuated and vice versa, which suggests the important role repetition plays in literature.