Chinese Reportage

Laughlin Charles A. Laughlin

Description

Chinese Reportage details for the first time in English the creation and evolution of a distinctive literary genre in twentieth-century China. Reportage literature, while sharing traditional journalism's commitment to the accurate, nonfictional portrayal of experience, was largely produced by authors outside the official news media. In identifying the literary merit of this genre and establishing its significance in China's leftist cultural legacy, Charles A. Laughlin reveals important biases that impede Western understanding of China and, at the same time, supplies an essential chapter in Chinese cultural history.Laughlin traces the roots of reportage (or baogao wenxue) to the travel literature of the Qing Dynasty but shows that its flourishing was part of the growth of Chinese communism in the twentieth century. In a modern Asian context critical of capitalism and imperialism, reportage offered the promise of radicalizing writers through a new method of literary practice and the hope that this kind of writing could in turn contribute to social revolution and China's national self-realization. Chinese Reportage explores the wide range of social engagement depicted in this literature: witnessing historic events unfolding on city streets; experiencing brutal working conditions in 1930s Shanghai factories; struggling in the battlefields and trenches of the war of resistance against Japan, the civil war, and the Korean war; and participating in revolutionary rural, social, and economic transformation. Laughlin's close readings emphasize the literary construction of social space over that of character and narrative structure, a method that brings out the critique of individualism and humanism underlying the genre's aesthetics.Chinese Reportage recaptures a critical aspect of leftist culture in China with far-reaching implications for historians and sociologists as well as literary scholars.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Media studies
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 11 octobre 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384120
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

C H I N E S E R E P O R T A G E

A S I A - P A C I F I C

Culture, Politics, and Society

Editors: Rey Chow, H. D. Harootunian,

and Masao Miyoshi

C H I N E S E

        .        

R E P O R T A G E

The Aesthetics of Historical Experience

Duke University Press

Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 

Designed by Rebecca Giménez

Information Systems, Inc.

Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

In memory of my father

Acknowledgments, ix

Frequently Cited Works, xi

Introduction, 

1Travel: Writing a Way Out, 

C O N T E N T S

2Public Demonstrations: The Mise-en-Scène of History, 

3Labor Reportage and the Factoryscape, 

4War Correspondence I: Terror and the Wound, 

5War Correspondence II: Guerrilla Landscapes, 

6Socialist Reportage, 

Conclusions, 

Notes, 

Bibliography, 

Index, 

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

A project over a period of years usually incurs more debts than can be briefly acknowledged, but those who helped shape this project are in fact few in number. C. T. Hsia and David Wang contributed a great deal to the formulation of the topic, which uncannily and somewhat unex- pectedly addressed a wide variety of my intellectual interests. The lion’s share of my dissertation research in Beijing was made possible by a grant from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China. While in Beijing I was fortunate to work under the guidance of Professor Zhao Xiaqiu of Renmin University. Through her and the assistance of her stu- dents Qin Xinchun, Hou Jin, and Chen Fensen, I was able to meet and interview writers like Xiao Qian, Huang Gang, and Chen Huangmei as well as modern prose scholars Yuan Liangjun, Lin Fei, Zhang Manjun, and Yin Junsheng, all of whose creative visions and ideas saturate this study. Several classmates also writing dissertations at Columbia University contributed materially to the writing process by exchanging commen- tary and chapter drafts, a practice I highly recommend, especially across disciplines. Among them I would particularly like to thank Kristina Torgeson, Kristine Harris, Andre Schmidt, Margherita Zanasi, and Kim Brandt for their insights, criticism, and encouragement.