Chinese Literature Podcast VII
Sep. 16th, 2021 04:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_los
I can’t believe the Chinese Literature Podcast American Sinology Bros have levelled up from bad takes on the Mao era to bad readings of Star Trek. These men were designed in a lab to hurt me.
Roughly transcribed: ‘one of the biggest barriers to understanding China today is the inability to take the mid-century period and propaganda seriously and see connections [between it and what came before and after]’.
Gentlemen, THIS IS YOU. THIS IS YOU EVERY DAY?? I NEED YOU TO GO TO YOUR BATHROOM. THERE SHOULD BE A REFLECTIVE SURFACE ABOVE THE SINK. NOW, I KNOW YOU HAVE AVOIDED IT YOUR ENTIRE LIFE OUT OF TERROR LIKE THE LADY OF SHALOTT FEARED TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, BUT SIRS—
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That's One Weird Utopia: Kang Youwei's “Book of Great Unity”
A utopian work by Kang Youwei, one of the thinkers behind the self-strengthening movement, who’s no longer as influential as his martyred disciple.
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Ling Mengzhu's “The Tangerines and the Tortoise Shell”
A huaben about a nice and intelligent but terminally unlucky merchant who accidentally becomes a great (and arguably ethical) capitalist through a series of good bargains.
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Shi Zhecun's Weird and Wonderful “The General's Head”
A ‘magic realist’ 1932 short story set in the Tang dynasty about national and personal identity.
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I felt this treatment of lyric poetry in the Song might have benefitted from a little more engagement with the highly music basis of very early Chinese poetry (I’m thinking about the shi jing), changing standards in genre over time (a lot of what we now think of as high culture was decidedly not constructed that way, when it was ‘live’), the prestige-based and cultural construction reasons people may well favour Tang work now (if indeed they do), and/or the lyric in English poetic contexts, as a point of comparison. Then-contemporary issues of class and accessibility also in this picture. I don’t know how fruitfully we can have a conversation about the lyric vs written poetry without these frames of reference.
