Read e-book online A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and PDF

By Michael Berry

ISBN-10: 0231141629

ISBN-13: 9780231141628

The portrayal of historic atrocity in fiction, movie, and pop culture can show a lot concerning the functionality of person reminiscence and the transferring prestige of nationwide id. within the context of chinese language tradition, motion pictures equivalent to Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness and Lou Ye's Summer Palace and novels corresponding to Ye Zhaoyan's Nanjing 1937: A Love Story and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age jointly reimagine previous horrors and provides upward thrust to new ancient narratives.

Michael Berry takes an cutting edge examine the illustration of six particular ancient traumas in sleek chinese language historical past: the Musha Incident (1930); the Rape of Nanjing (1937-38); the February 28 Incident (1947); the Cultural Revolution (1966-76); Tiananmen sq. (1989); and the Handover of Hong Kong (1997). He identifies basic modes of restaging ancient violence: centripetal trauma, or violence inflicted from the skin that evokes a reexamination of the chinese language state, and centrifugal trauma, which, originating from inside of, conjures up disturbing narratives which are projected out onto a transnational imaginative and prescient of world desires and, occasionally, nightmares.

These modes permit Berry to attach portrayals of mass violence to principles of modernity and the kingdom. He additionally illuminates the connection among ancient atrocity on a countrywide scale and the ache skilled via the person; the functionality of movie and literature as historic testimony; the intersection among politics and artwork, historical past and reminiscence; and the actual benefits of contemporary media, that have came across new technique of narrating the load of old violence.

As chinese language artists started to probe formerly taboo features in their nation's background within the ultimate a long time of the 20 th century, they created texts that prefigured, echoed, or subverted social, political, and cultural tendencies. A historical past of Pain recognizes the far-reaching impact of this artwork and addresses its profound function in shaping the general public mind's eye and conception-as good as misconception-of smooth chinese language history.

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The result of this lack of national consciousness is violence manifested on both individual and national levels. In fact, it could be argued that the rise in depictions of national scourges not only mirrors but in some ways also is inextricably intertwined with prelude: a history of pain 26 the rise of new conceptions of nationalism in late-Qing China among writers and intellectuals like Wu Jianren. ” Without any words to respond, the generals stood in silence. ” Those Tartars had already been brutal and merciless in their raping and pillaging—there was already no crime they had not committed.

As David Der-wei Wang observes, “Lu Xun is known to have manufactured or refashioned personal experience for literary purposes. 5 The suggestion that the iconic moment that supposedly gave rise to Lu Xun’s fictional universe was yet another fiction carries potentially devastating consequences for a series of deeply imbedded literary views. But also under examination is the relationship between history and fiction, or, more succinctly, historical atrocities and fictional representations. What does it mean to be a witness to atrocity?

Most often, however, such depictions are not of national calamity and trauma but instead are rooted in the violence of the everyday—Wu Song’s ࣳ࣪ʳ visceral slaying of a man-eating tiger, or even the seemingly unending series of bloody battles between the Monkey King Sun Wukong ୪ஔ़ and a league of supernatural nemeses. The great masterworks of late imperial Chinese fiction all largely steer away from depictions of historical violence. The novel, still relatively new and not yet fully accepted as a legitimate literary form during the Ming, was primarily a genre to be read at leisure and perhaps not ideally suited to take on the burden of depicting the dark side of history and human nature.

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A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film by Michael Berry


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