The North American deconstructor J. Hillis Miller has revealed his impatience and lack of familiarity with Chinese literary studies in the West by remarking that Stephen Owen is virtually the only Western specialist in Chinese literature “who also knows something about Western literary theory and comparative literature.” The others whom Miller met at Yale and elsewhere were supposedly just creating “a mystique about how much they knew.” The four contributors to this special issue of Tamkang Review acknowledge the existence of ossified thinking and intellectual mystification in various corners of Western academe. In general, however, we find less of it in Chinese literary studies than in various North American departments of Western literature and cultural studies such as Miller's, which have been busily exporting poststructuralist and postmodernist theories to any department that will take it. Because poststructuralists like Miller typically congratulate themselves for having taking “the linguistic turn"—and yet write as if entirely unaware of the advances in the philosophy of language since Wittgenstein—the prominent narrative theorist Robert Storey has justifiably compared their activity to “paddling about in intellectual sandboxes.”

This introductory paper outlines the main ideas and some central arguments of several critical studies assigned in an interdisciplinary course entitled “Knowledge and Theory in the Academic Humanities.” The ultimate goal of the course, along with this essay, is to facilitate independent thought conducive to a skeptical and rational engagement with a number of highly problematic current theories—many of which have become hegemonic ideologies within comparative literature, cultural studies, and transnational studies. Therefore, the books and articles | highlight offer readings that are critical of the theoretical orientations in question: Freudian and neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism and neo-Marxism, Foucauldian discourse analysis, Saidian conjurings of “orientalism,” poststructuralism, and postmodernism. Postmodernism, so vaguely and contradictorily defined by its advocates, is here used as an umbrella term for all of these and other theoretical orientations operating under the illusion that the modern era has ended due to a recent paradigm shift away from a scientific world view and the values of the European Enlightenment. In every case, these theoretical orientations are shown to be lacking in evidentiary support. For that reason, these theories are held in low esteem by most serious academics, including scientists, historians, philosophers, and humanists. Moreover, these theoretical orientations are quite irrelevant to social activists working for human rights, equal justice, economic betterment of the poor, and environmental improvement throughout the world.

Postcolonialism, the study of colonial discourse and representation, is merely a subfield within the much broader field of post-colonial studies. I argue for the need to be cautious in applying the postcolonialist conceptual framework in Chinese studies, in light of its many limitations. I suggest that scholars adopt nuanced and empirically grounded models, and remain mindful of regional, cultural, and historical contexts and specificities. Using Lu Xun’s “Diary of the Madman” and Mo Yan’s Boozeland as examples, I demonstrate that it would be inappropriate to impose a reductive postcolonialist framework onto an interpretation of either of these two literary works. Although both works are fanciful at many levels, they are not simply assemblages of discourse that may be played with according to critical whim; responsible critics must take account of these works' mimetic capacities and historical contexts. Both works can be understood and fully appreciated only by means of more comprehensive critical approaches that take note of particularities and nuanced shades of meaning.

Books have become an important market commodity in mainland China since 1978. This development has greatly impacted the actions of readers, writers, and publishers—and has had far-reaching implications for the broader socio-cultural context in which modern Chinese literature is evolving. From a pragmatic standpoint that views reading as an act of consumption, subject to the push and pull of the market, Kang Xiaoguang and his co-authors bring a refreshing perspective to the study of modern Chinese literature with their 1998 survey of the reading preferences and practices of Beijingers from young to old, A Perspective on Reading Among the Chinese: Surveying the Reading Activities of the Masses from 1978 to 1998. By extension, their findings indicate the alarming degree to which the academic field of modern Chinese literature studies, with its predilection for various “postist” approaches, is becoming increasingly detached from what actually transpires in mainstream modern Chinese literary culture. This article concludes that scholars of modern Chinese literature must approach their research with a heightened sense of reality, emphasize empirical approaches in research methodology, and better extend their purview to popular literature.

This article summarizes some key achievements in the field of moden Chinese literary studies in the West, while pointing to areas where major deficiencies remain. One major problem is the common poststructuralist assumption that literature and language are ”closed systems of a purely self-reflexive sort; complex and fascinating mimetic aspects of literature are hence often overlooked or even scornfully dismissed. This mimetic heresy or referential anxiety is a symptom of a larger problem: the tendenoy to accept the positions of a Western academic literary “authority” like Jameson or Said largely on faith, instead of subjecting even the most popular academic hypotheses to critical scholarly scrutiny. A more critical approach to handling ambiguous interpretive terminology and variant editions would also improve the field's long-term intellectual standing and its prospects for broadening its interdisciplinary reach.

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