Panel 1: Conceptual Frameworks of Modernity

Alex Des Forges "'Literary Modernity': Its Uses and Flaws as Aesthetic Code, Analytic Tool, and Fetish."
Zhang Jingyuan: "Modern Science and Literary Revolution"
Yang Xiaobin: "Answering the Question: What Is Chinese Postmodernism/Post-Mao-Dengism?"

Panel 2: Defining the Chinese Diaspora

Ann Huss "In the Tabernacle of Their (Chinese) Souls: Nationalism and Writing in Diaspora"
Lingchei Letty Chen "Crossing Communities and Reconfiguring Cultural Identity: Maxine Hong Kingston's Journey across East and West"
Emma Teng "What's 'Chinese' in Chinese Diasporic Literature?"

Panel 3: Capitalism, Commercialism, and Cultural Production in Urban China

Wang Lingzhen: "Reproducing the Self: Market, Desire, and Writing in Contemporary Chinese Women's Autobiographical Practice in the 1990s."
Sabina Knight: "Capitalist and Enlightenment Values in 1990s Chinese Fiction"
Robin Visser: "Urban Ethics: Modernity and the Morality of Everyday Life"
Claire Conceison: "Boundary-Crossing in Wang Gui's Da Liuyang ("The Great Going Abroad")"

Panel 4: Assessing Visual Culture

Carlos Rojas "A Chip off the Old (Wood-)block: Lu Xun and Wood-block Illustrations"
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow "Spectacular Novelties: Huabao, Photography, and the 'News' Culture of the 1920s"
Liu Jianmei: "The Unusual Literary Scene: Revolution, Sex, and Fashion"

Panel 5: Conceiving and Cannonizing Gender

Amy Dooling
Megan Ferry " Literary histories of women writers."
Tze-lan Deborah Sang "Narratives of Female Homoerotic Desire in China after Socialism and Taiwan after Martial Law"

Panel 6: History and Memory in Fiction, Film, and Drama

Xu Gang "Remembering the Butterfly: Ye Zhaoyan's Passionate Memory and Fictional History"
Yomi Braester “Taipei and Beijing Cinematic Poetics of Demolition.”
John B. Weinstein "The Comics of Destruction: Li Guoxiu¹s Theatrical Vision of Post-Martial Law Taibei"

Claire Conceison
"Boundary-Crossing in Wang Gui's Da Liuyang ("The Great Going Abroad")"

Wang Gui's 1991-1992 production of The Great Going Abroad was an important and unique experiment in boundary-crossing on numerous level--including thematic, financial, professional, artistic, physical, and political. The subject of the play itself concerns crossing international boundaries and the trauma of relocation overseas. The entrepreneur who financed the production crossed professional boundaries, by venturing into artistic enterprises, and legal boundaries by defaulting on borrowed funds which resulted in his imprisonment. The director and writing collaborator, Wang Gui, crossed artistic and aesthetic boundaries in independently assembling the production and executing an original experimental theatrical vision which combines and interrogates musical theatre, karaoke, modern dance, absurdism, mixed media, and action film elements. Wang Gui, together with the script's ghost-writer, Wang Peigong (both well-known for their 1985 collaboration on the controversial play "W.M."), crossed political boundaries in creating a piece that speaks on two ideological levels, one of which is the othodox party-line, the other of which is a scathing commentary on the Chinese psyche and society. Finally, the play crossed unusual physical boundaries by avoiding major cities (for political reasons) and touring remote provinces instead. Altogether, the production's contestation of conventional "boundaries" of contemporary theatre in urban China resulted in a singularly unique theatre event--intentionally obscured by its renowned creators, but illuminated here in hopes it will gain the significant recognition it deserves.

Alex Des Forges
"'Literary Modernity': Its Uses and Flaws as Aesthetic Code, Analytic Tool, and Fetish."

This paper constitutes the initial stages of a reassessment of the usefulness of "modernity" as an aesthetic standard and a metholodological resource in the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese literature. It begins by tracing the development of "modern Chinese literature" as a field of study in the United States, and shows how emphasis on "modernity" as a recognizable quality of literary texts serves as a necessary supplement to conceptions of aesthetic value in the constitution of the field. More recently, interest in "literary modernity" has led scholars to expand the canon of modern Chinese literature beyond the initial set of May Fourth authors and their works, and has inspired more sophisticated readings of a variety of texts. The constitution of the field in this way has come at a price, however: the reification of an unchanging "Chinese tradition" against which "modern" literature must struggle. As modern Chinese literature, with its privileged links to the increasingly popular fields of film studies and literary theory, becomes dominant in the study of Chinese texts in the American academy, this reification grows more problematic. Originally oppositional and critical, emphasis on "modernity" in literary scholarship today too often works to restrict Chinese critical discourses to a marginal position in the contemporary theoretical canon -- most obviously when it valorizes nineteenth-century European theoretical constructs even as it neglects nineteenth-century Chinese texts. At the same time, the essentially fetishistic and belated character of "literary modernity" in every instance -- not just in literature written in Chinese -- is overlooked. In conclusion, this paper will attempt to address the following questions: What are the implications of the formation of jindai wenxue as a field of study in China over the last two decades? To what extent does recent work on nineteenth-century literature by scholars of "modern" and "premodern" literature active in the United States challenge the disciplinary structures within which we operate? What are some of the more specific tools of literary analysis that can call our institutional self-definition into question in productive ways?

Sabina Knight
"Capitalist and Enlightenment Values in 1990s Chinese Fiction"

I examine two or three examples of 1990s fiction in relation to the current conjuncture in China of (a) a new ethic of commodification, consumption and leisure and (b) a troubled, but enduring relationship to Enlightenment values.  Observing cross-themes and topoi, I identify questions of race, class, values, and political disenchantment to posit the perseverance of Enlightenment values.  Representing the 1990s as a time of numerous shifts in moral, economic and sexual values and power relations, what kind of ideological effect do these works achieve?   Do they (a) render heroic the predatory nature of capitalist society, the pursuit of commodities, and the reconstitution of sexuality in a fetishized mode that can be used to mobilize consumer spending, or do they (b) bespeak oppositional yearnings amidst the hegemony of consumer-capitalism. (The latter would seek to redeem the ideals of the Enlightenment project of modernity.)
Possible works: Wang Anyi's recent fiction and/or Yu Hua's novel "Xu Sanguan mai xue ji" [Journal of Xu Sanguan the Blood Seller] (1996).

Emma Teng: 

"What's 'Chinese' in Chinese Diasporic Literature?"

This paper examines how writers in the Chinese Diaspora represent "Chineseness" in relation to their own identities as exiles, immigrants, transplants, or travelers. In his essay on "Cultural China: The Periphery as Center," Tu Wei-ming argues that "the meaning of being Chinese is intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept and Chinese culture as a lived reality." Tu divides cultural China into three symbolic universes: the first consists of the PRC and other societies populated predominantly by ethnic Chinese; the second consists of the Chinese Diaspora; and the third consists of non-Chinese individuals who try to understand China intellectually. The meaning of being Chinese differs in each of these symbolic universes. Tu further argues that in the coming century it will be the periphery of cultural China that will set the economic and cultural agendas for the next century. If Tu is correct, then it is literature from the periphery, rather than literature produced in the PRC, which will become the major force in defining "the meaning of being Chinese." This paper seeks to determine if Tu's model of three concentric circles of Chineseness can be applied to an analysis of Chinese Diasporic literature, or if other paradigms of figuring "Chineseness" emerge from a reading of the literature. I compare the writings of Hwee Hwee Tan (Singapore), Shirley Geok-lin Lim (Malaysia/America), Sola Liu (London/NY), Maxine Hong Kingston (America), Amy Tan (America), Frank Chin (America), S.K. Chang (America), and Yang Lian (New Zealand), in order to examine how various writers have treated issues of exile, immigration and biculturalism. In asking "what is Chinese" in Chinese Diasporic literature, I focus in particular on issues of language: the question of a "mother tongue," the use of dialect v. standard Mandarin, bilingualism, and the relation of "Chineseness" to language. Is language a key unifying factor between the three "symbolic universes" of cultural China? Or does language [dialect] have a different status in the different circles? Is there a difference between Chinese diasporic literature written in Chinese and that written in other languages? Is it still "Chinese literature" if it is written in English? If so, what does that say about the position of "Chinese American" literature in the academy today? I also explore how writers imagine and refashion what it means to be "Chinese," and what it means to be a citizen of the world. Diasporic authors are often concerned with forging a "Chineseness" that is separated and distinct from the geopolitical concept of China. Do they then foreground Chinese culture as the source of the "meaning of being Chinese"? In many works of Diasporic literature, China is figured as a ghostly presence, an absent signifier. How does this ghostly presence shape the self in Diaspora/exile? Does the lack of a clearly defined "homeland" distinguish Chinese Diasporic writing from Jewish Diasporic writing? Does the separation of culture from nationalism make Chinese American literature distinct from Korean American literature, for example? These are some of the questions I attempt to explore as I look at writings from authors in diverse locations of the Chinese Diaspora.

Zhang Jingyuan
"Modern Science and Literary Revolution"

     In 1959, British author C. P. Snow wrote about what he called the "two cultures" of science and the humanities, lamenting their disconnection and urging greater communication and understanding.  It is perhaps unclear now whether we have greater integration or greater fragmentation.  But eighty years ago the connection between the two cultures constituted an extremely fruitful moment for Chinese history.
     Two very important events for Chinese intellectual and cultural life in the early part of the twentieth century are (a) the start of the baihua or vernacular movement - what Hu Shi termed a "literary revolution" (wenxue geming), and (b) the founding of the Chinese Science Society and its journal Kexue (Science), the ancestor of Academica Sinica in Taiwan and of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on the mainland.  Vastly more attention has been given to the former than to the latter in cultural circles, and the two have almost never been discussed in connection with each other.  But both are culturally important, and in fact they were very closely linked.  Both origins took place at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in the 1910s; they involved many of the same people, and they were motivated by many of the same ideas and influences.  I propose to discuss the close connections between the two beginnings: connections in influence, aims, individuals, and even activities common to the two.  

Megan Ferry
" Literary histories of women writers."

This paper examines several literary histories of women's writings that appeared between 1915 and 1935. It takes into account the authors of these texts, their selection of authors and their genres, and the justification for the books. The paper argues that these literary histories function much like the ones which confirm short fiction as an integral and longstanding participant in Chinese literary history. Both kinds of histories rework the literary tradition and are sites of "contested modernity" in that they at once reconfigure the past while projecting an idealized nostalgia of such a past onto a preconditioned future. These literary histories, while acknowledging women's literary production, relegate women's writings to a place outside the "mainstream." Furthermore, contemporary women writers are denied literary authority as they too are associated with this newly embedded history and predetermined means of production. 2. Marketing modern Chinese women writers. This paper looks at how women's writings have been received by their reading public and marketed throughout this century. It takes into account the diverging interests of political and market agendas. From the tabloid-like status of 1930s women writers to the revolutionary New Woman of the 1940s and 1950s to the "sexing" of women writers for domestic and international markets of the 1990s, this paper demonstrates how women's texts and persons have been maniuplated both by politics and the market spheres in the course of China's modern developments  

Liu Jianmei:
"The Unusual Literary Scene: Revolution, Sex, and Fashion"

The literary field following the May Fourth Movement (1919) experienced the turbulent time of searching for a new subjectivity, which was carried out not only by active literary writings, but also by the interaction between literary writers and their professional environment. Previous scholarship has paid much attention to the severe political situation that triggered the new identity of "revolutionary literature." However, the dramatic change that the literary field went through also resulted from the logic and idea of newness, which impelled modern Chinese writers to commit to whoever new identities that could make difference from that of the May Fourth generation. What strikes me as important here is less the truth of various claims for revolution than the peculiar historical circumstances that compel those young and old writers to jump into the disturbing power relations of wentan, which as a result of struggle could no longer be an independent and self-evident literary space. Accordingly, one must analyze the position of literary field within relations of force between agents or between institutes, going beyond the established modes of textual interpretation. In this paper, my specific focus will be on the relation between writers, literary groups, their representation of politics and gender, and the circulation of fashion. In undertaking this study, I will not assume the coherent identity of revolution-as-modernity but try to understand the changing of wentan as an ongoing historical project that involves the agency of different groups of writers and critics. Through looking at literary debates in the literary field, male writers' contested representation of female bodies, and different understanding of fashion among three proletarian journals, I try to historicize the transitional period of Revolutionary Literature, which appears to me, consisted of full of gaps and overlapping, interplays of difference and distance, and can not be seen as a simple, familiar, and transparent ideological legacy. Since my paper not only discusses fictional representation, but also deals with literary journals and theoretical debates, it fits into the category of requestioning generic boundary. In addition, my examination of male writers' contentious representation of gender and politics also challenges the essential feminist reading of gender.

Yang Xiaobin
"Answering the Question: What Is Chinese Postmodernism/Post-Mao-Dengism?"

This paper starts from the discussion of the debate over postmodernism during the years of 1995-96 between Zhao Yiheng, Zhang Longxi and Xu Ben on one side and Zhang Yiwu and Liu Kang on the other. After scrutinizing the articles they produced, one may find that the major problem of the debate is that no one seems to bother defining such terms as modernity/modernism and postmodernity/postmodernism. The pitfalls of Chinese postmodern theories and the blind spots of the anti-postmodern theories will be probed. By examining the relationship between modernity in general and Chinese modernity in particular, this paper also desires to see how Chinese postmodernity serves as a deconstructive force that disrupts the master discourse of Chinese modernity, that is, the Mao-Deng discourse. I will focus on the question of how the Enlightenment ideology, embedded in 20th-century Chinese literature, becomes the authoritarian mode of thinking and writing that serves as the basis of the modern, and therefore Mao-Deng, discourse. Examples from canonical modern Chinese fiction (Lu Xun and others) and Mao's writings will reveal that the representational mode in both literary and political discourses relies on a supreme, modern subject. While this modern subject can be seen as potentially self-undermining when carefully read, Chinese avant-garde literature that emerged from the mid-1980s decisively problematizes the modern tropes and the grand historical subject. Ultimately, this paper is an attempt to (re)define Chinese postmodernism based on the psychohistorical reality that China has undergone, and to point out that Chine postmodernism cannot be simply viewed against the current background of economic and cultural globalization. In order to interpret Chinese postmodernity, we must first look at the historical context of the 20th-century China that corresponds to its western counterpart. If the post-Auschwitz indicates the crisis of modernity in the West, the same post-catastrophic and the post-traumatic psychohistorical phenomenon can also be found in what I would call the post-Cultural Revolution syndrome in China, insofar as the Cultural Revolution is as at once summit and abyss of Chinese modernity. By theorizing Chinese avant-gardism against the background of the sociohistorical catastrophe, we can discover the conflation of psychic Nachträglichkeit (after-effect) and literary postmodernity. By reading Chinese avant-garde literature, we can observe the coalition of the postmodern cultural impetus and the post-Mao-Deng political unconscious.

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow
"Spectacular Novelties: Huabao, Photography, and the 'News' Culture of the 1920s"

Photography first regularly made its way into the popular print culture of late nineteenth century China in the form of composed landscapes, courtesan portraits, and foreign 'postcards', serving as decorative end-page inserts in literary journals. In 1907, a publication founded by overseas Chinese students in Paris billed itself as the first Chinese "photographic journal," and among its advertised features was a section on news images. This early conjunction of photography and journalism, however, suffered from a lack of temporal urgency: the journal's 'photo exclusives' from a 1905 anti-imperialism rally in Shanghai were at least two years out of date. It was not until almost two decades later, that the promise of earlier visual media (such as the Dianshizhai huabao ) to be a dazzling source of 'the new,' and of news, was fulfilled. In 1920 the Shanghai -based Shibao became the first major newspaper to publish a photojournalistic news supplement, in order to "illuminate through images the many new things in the world that cannot be described merely in words." The news-worthiness, timeliness, and spectacular nature of images now became of utmost importance to readers who were increasingly sophisticated consumers of the new 'news' culture, and who demanded eye-witness accounts (mudu) and exclusives (dujia). That, and the development of faster, cheaper printing technologies, resulted in an unprecedented photographic huabao publishing craze in China starting in the 1920s. In this paper I explore the importance of news and novelty in both the social sphere and the discursive imagination of this period, especially in its symbiotic relationship with the timely and 'truthful' photographic image. What was the role of the professional 'eye' journalist who captured snapshots of the city and its people, instructing readers on what to look for in the confusing kaleidoscope of a new society? How did images both augment and undermine traditional literary authority? In what ways did the popular consumption of huabao teach a new mode of photographic seeing? I will anchor my discussion around several popular pictorials of the 1920s, including the Liangyou huabao and the Shijie huabao, and examine the ways in which the novel and the spectacular conjoined to form a new mode of mass culture in Republican China.

XU Gang
"Remembering the Butterfly: Ye Zhaoyan's Passionate Memory and Fictional History"

One of the most prolific Chinese writers in the 1990s, Ye Zhaoyan has tried his hands on many different themes and styles. His fictional writings range from melodramatic love stories against the background of the early Republican period, to illicit sexual relations saturated in the dull everydayness of contemporary life during the turn of the millennium; from the sublimity of history, to the unspeakable secrecy of personal experience and desire; and from small town oral legends to the political struggle in the old capital Nanjing. He seems to be determined to carry on the unfulfilled aspirations of Ni Huanzhi, the title character in his grandfather Ye Shaojun's famous novel, in the three arenas of the pedagogical, the romantic, and the political. The analogy between these two writers is made possible by not only their thematic symmetries but also their equally ambiguous attitude toward qing (passion, desire) and the similar extent to which their narratives are shaped by such an ambiguity. Interestingly, these two writers have taken a similar path but toward completely opposite directions - both the grandfather's life and writing career as a novelist can be read as a bildungsroman as he grew out of his early affiliation with the Saturday school and his original ethical concern of tongqing (sympathy, compassion) into an ardent revolutionary and an avid educator, whereas the grandson is seduced into writing about "decadent" desires which were typical of the writing motif and style of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction. This paper therefore intends to explore the implications of the different direction Ye Zhaoyan has taken in remembering or even reviving the Butterfly fiction. In order to do so, several pairs of relationship that are crucial elements of the twentieth century Chinese literary history will have to be touched upon: imported realism and indigenous Chinese modes of representation, fiction and history, memory and ethics. Since all these relationships are in various degrees hinged upon the representation of passion and desire, this paper will focus on the discussion of the role played by qing in Ye Zhaoyan's fiction.

Lingzhen Wang
"Re-producing the Self: Market, Desire, and Writing in Contemporary Chinese Women's Autobiographical Practice in the 1990s"

"Living as a woman in silence," Yu Luojin lamented in 1982, "is not as tough as telling the truth in public." Indeed, it is through the persistent effort made by many Chinese women writers like Yu to voice themselves in public that different versions of history have survived. Chinese women's autobiographical practice emerged in the late Qing period (from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century) and flourished after the May Fourth Cultural Movement of 1919, until it virtually disappeared after 1949, with the establishment of People's Republic of China, only to re-appear in the 1980s in various guises. Throughout this period, dominant political ideologies and traditional gender conventions played significant roles in the ups and downs of the genre. In the 1990s, however, with the rapid development of a market economy, urbanization, and cultural commodification, women's autobiographical practice has blossomed into different styles, enjoying considerable popularity and success. With subjective, fragmented, disordered, memory-oriented, and monologue-like characteristics, women's autobiographical writing since the early 90s has repeatedly centered on such subjects as female bodies, mother-daughter bonding, sexual desire, homo-erotic relationships, fantasy, and death. How should we relate all these new features of Chinese women's autobiographical practice to the market economy? Did the market liberate and awaken Chinese women and enable them to express their desires and selves as individual subjects freely, or did it help produce new images of female self that have functioned to restructure women's self-perceptions and identities as well as initiate and fulfill the desire of a consumer public? Or are they just two sides of the same coin? What does writing mean under such circumstances? What does writing as a woman mean? What does writing autobiographically as a woman mean in a postsocialist and consumer society like today's China? I will focus on the relationship between the socialist Market economy and Chinese women's autobiographical practices in the 90s. By concentrating on four Chinese women writers (Zhang Jie, Wang Anyi, Chen Ran, and Lin Bai) and their autobiographical practices in the 90s, I will examine 1) the logic(s) and effects manifested in the Market's re-configuration(s) of self, desire, gender, sex, and mass culture (autobiographical writing included); and 2) Chinese women's specific negotiations of personal identities in Market times when the personal simultaneously exhibits the most unique and reproducible features.

Tze-lan Deborah Sang
"Narratives of Female Homoerotic Desire in China after Socialism and Taiwan after Martial Law"

Since the late 1980s, the formerly tabooed subject of female homoeroticism has appeared in a plethora of sites on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, such as popular journalism, Internet discussions, anthropological and sociological studies, literary theory, and emerging lesbian community magazines. This paper proposes to focus on the narratives of female homoerotic desire by two female novelists: Qiu Miaojin (1969-95) from Taiwan and Chen Ran (1962-) of mainland China. Both novelists have not shunned but rather flirted with or even embraced the social stigma of lesbianism in modern Chinese societies, for they narrate frequently in the first-person voice, which invites the reader's speculations about the overlap between the protagonist's and the author's erotic orientations. They have tried to not only carve out an inhabitable space for lesbian desire in the public imagination but also dismantle dominant gender ideology. By analyzing their works, we gain a glimpse of a new lesbian-feminist development in the transnational Chinese public sphere. Moreover, to fully understand their significance requires sensitivity to both the local contexts from which they grow and the global ideas and movements that they partake. The definitions of the global and the local in this case are relative and by not means absolute and dichotomous, however, since the local circumstances themselves are already the outgrowth of more than a century of modernization, including modern nationalisms in response to colonialist encroachment. The situation is further compounded by the tension between woman and nationalism. The creative and critical energies that the female writers represent, in other words, may not be adequately characterized by the dual terms of globalism and Chinese cultural nationalism, which, according to the anthropologist Lisa Rofel, have dominated the debates on contemporary Chinese gay male identities in certain gay activist circles in 1990s Hong Kong and cosmopolitan China.

Yomi Braester
“Taipei and Beijing Cinematic Poetics of Demolition.”

In this paper I explore the role of nostalgia and memory in three films, namely Qingchun wuhui (No regrets about youth, PRC, 1992), Feixia Ada (aka The Red Lotus Society, ROC, 1994), and Aiqing wansui (Vive l’amour, ROC, 1994). These works present a sensitivity to urban spaces that can be traced back to fin de siècle social structures and literary tactics. Side by side with a historical consciousness, the films also embrace the changing cityscape and engage with the destruction of its landmarks, creating a poetics of demolition and forgetting. The paper relates to "crossing boundaries" in several ways: on the physical level, it is about the destruction of spaces; on the metaphorical level, I discuss the blurring of private and public space; at an even more abstract level, I talk about how time and space become metaphors for one another, and how they work together to erase what may be the most important though illusive boundary, namely memory.

Lingchei Letty Chen
"Crossing Communities and Reconfiguring Cultural Identity: Maxine Hong Kingston's Journey across East and West"

With a series of narrative maneuvers in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, the Asian/Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston attempts to come to terms with her hybrid cultural identity by establishing a new cultural discourse. But instead of constructing a narrative to identify the characteristics of an Asian/Chinese American culture, Kingston emphasizes an aesthetics of appropriation and imitation to dramatize the obvious lack of social and cultural space for Asian/Chinese Americans' self-representation. Infusing the main narrative of her novel are two distinct literary languages, that of the Chinese and American literatures. Such a strategy underscores the structural dependence of the Chinese American cultural identity on both cultural/literary discourses as a necessary mode for constructing the ethnic subject's individual identity and ultimately his/her community. Defying Asian American literature's traditional narrative practice of realism, Kingston injects into this novel an aesthetic playfulness characteristic of postmodernist performativity. This is significant because it represents a new identity politics in formation. But what needs to be investigated here is, how the ideology of postmodernism, one that challenges the validity of any discourse of homogeneity can necessarily contribute to the Asian/Chinese American writer's attempt to conceptualize a unity of identities that is a pan-ethnic Asian American identity. In this regard, the subversive inclination of postmodernist aesthetics serves as a powerful tool for the Asian/Chinese American writer to contrive a new power relation with the two (Chinese and American) centers by deconstructing the symbolic power structure of both. Kingston appropriates the Chinese classics to create another "China" that can be incorporated into "the America" represented by American theater. However, Kingston's visions of an allegorical "China" and "America" are created out of a literary past, a rather peculiar time-space to reconfigure cultural stereotyping as well as to form a new hybrid cultural identity. Ironically, though, by using such a time-space, and through the method of parodic self-contradiction and self-subversion seen in the writer's simultaneous dismissal of and dependency on the appropriated/imitated literary and cultural texts, an unexpected result occurs. Kingston actually can avoid having to decide between which country is her homeland and which is her host society. What is Kingston's desired position and identification? In order to sustain the Asian/Chinese American subject, Kingston also needs to develop a cultural language for it to express and distinguish itself from other cultural-ethnic subjects in America. Should Kingston also build a community for her subject, one with a tradition or a set of beliefs to bind together its memebers? Yet, who will qualify as members -- Chinese Americans, all Asian Americans, or all Americans? A community with organizing principles would mean exclusiveness, and it is precisely communal exclusivity which Kingston and her protagonist Wittman Ah Sing are fighting against. How, then, should Kingston imagine her own community? What kind of community would that be? These questions, which are crucial to understanding the identity politics of the Asian American in the 1990s, are the issues this paper will tackle.

Robin Visser
"Urban Ethics: Modernity and the Morality of Everyday Life"

One aspect of the 1990s cultural debs in China is the notion of individual ethics and the relationship between individual action and social good, particularly in the absence of prior restraints on human behavior under the norms prevailing under socialist modes of production. The discussions about the crisis of 'renwen jingshen' (humanitarian spirit) are rife with a sense that Chinese intellectuals, not to mention Chinese society as a whole, have "lost" their moral sensibility and no longer adhere to 'zhongji guanhuai' (ultimate concerns), thus these scholars search for ways to recover a language of commitment to a greater whole.

On the other hand, there are those critics who disagree with such a dour assessment of contemporary culture, instead celebrating "post-modern sensibilities" in 1990s urban literature. Chen Xiaoming, for example, celebrates the absence of "interiority" in 'xin zhuangtai' (new state of affairs) fiction, described as "unreflective" writing which directly represents the raw, vulgar reality of contemporary urban culture.

In my consideration of this fiction I disagree with both sides of this moralistic debate, as 1990s urban narratives are permeated with questions of individual ethics and meaning, albeit posed non-didactically. In this paper I examine the ethical questions raised by modernity and the marketplace in late 1990s works by authors representative of "new state of affairs" urban fiction.

Qiu Huadong, Zhu Wen, and He Dun write city narrative in which their characters respond to the moral dilemma posed by modernity in a variety of ways. In Qiu's 'Cangyan' (Fly Eyes, 1998) characters attempt urban heroics, hermit-like retreat, and renewed commitment to prosaic everyday life as various means of instilling their lives with purpose. The protagonist of Zhu's 'Shenme shi laji, shenme shi ai' (What's Trash, What's Love, 1998) gains a heightened sense of awareness about the futality of his daily existence, but is ultimately unable to fabricate a means of "reconnecting" or making "real contact" with life. In "Didi ni hao" (Hello, Younger Brother, 1993) and 'Ximalaya shan' (The Himalayas, 1998), He Dun portrays those who either resign themselves to fate, accepting modern life as it comes, or forge their own escape attempts by seeking a purer, simpler mode of existence. Each of these urban tales foreground ethical issues which have arisen as individuals are faced with the burden of creating new belief systems as the crumbling ideologies of the 1980s are being supplanted by the logic of the marketplace.

Carlos Rojas
"A Chip off the Old (Wood-)Block: Lu Xun and the New Woodblock Movement"

It is undoubtedly one of the great ironies of modern Chinese literary history that Lu Xun, commonly identified as the "father of modern Chinese Literature" and renowned for his role in spear-heading the baihua movement to bring written Chinese closer to the modern spoken vernacular, saw fit to dedicate most of his energies during the last years of his life (1931-1936) to the "non-literary" Chinese "New Wood-cut Movement." An enthusiastic participant in virtually all facets of this movement, Lu Xun not only spear-headed the movement itself, but also encouraged young artists, amassed a large personal collection of both Chinese and foreign woodcuts, oversaw the publication of several collections of wood-cut illustrations, was the designer of the wood-block cover art for both his own books and those of others, as well as of being an artist himself. This paper will examine the ambivalencies Lu Xun's relationship to this movement, particularly are emblematized by the qualifier "new" [xinxing], in the wood-block movement's full title: "China's new wood-block movement." The early twentieth century Chinese wood-block movement was marked by several peculiar ironies. Most notable is the coincidence that it was precisely on the heels of the late nineteenth introduction of Western lithography into Asia that the rather retrograde, centuries-old technology of wood-block printing began to enjoy a resurgence in popularity in both China and Japan. At the same time, this early twentieth century renaissance of Asian woodblock art was celebrated precisely for its modernism, in spite of its extremely long tradition in Asia itself.