Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism

Xiaoping Wang, Ph.D. (2010), University of Texas at Austin, is distinguished professor of comparative literature at Tongji University, and adjunct professor of the Institute of Arts and Humanities of Shanghai Jiaotong University, China. He has published more than 100 articles and numerous monographs, including Contending for the "Chinese Modern": The Writing of Fiction in the Great Transformative Epoch of Modern China 1937-1949 (Brill, 2019); Postsocialist Conditions: Ideas and History in China’s “Independent Cinema”, 1988-2008 (Brill, 2018); Ideology and Utopia in China’s New Wave Cinema: Globalization and Its Chinese Discontents (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and China in the Age of Global Capitalism: Jia Zhangke's Filmic World(Routledge, 2019).

• AcknowledgementsList of FiguresIntroduction: Mapping the Multivalence of Contemporary Chinese Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism1 Post-New Period, Postmodernism and Postsocialism2 Raymond Williams’ Three Cultures and the Chinese Variations3 Structural Outline of the Five Featurespart 1: The Structure of Feeling of the Traditional Socialist Era1 A Lyrical Poet in the Era of Postsocialism: On Some Motifs of Fanken Chen’s Poems1 Attachment to a “Cultural China” and Yearning for a “Political China”2 A Heroic Complex with the Plebeian Consciousness3 The Motifs of Patriotism and Homesickness4 Affective Economy and the Spiritual World of the Socialist Era5 Conclusion2 On the Historical-Cultural Connotations of “Chinese New Poetry”: Fu Tianhong’s Poems as a Case-Study1 The Formation of the Rebellious Personality and Critical Consciousness2 Pioneering Spirit, Perseverance and the Desire for Freedom3 Critique of the Alienation of a Commercialized Society4 Historical Retrospection and Social Activities5 Conclusionpart 2: The Historical Consciousness of the New Liberal Humanism3 Anatomizing China’s “Avant-Garde Fiction”: Articulating Historical Experience in Formal Experimentation1 Ma Yuan: The Dispersion of Meaning during Secularization2 Ge Fei: Disintegration and Dispersion of the Subject3 Yu Hua: Historical Projection of a Post-Revolutionary Secular Society4 Su Tong: Retrospection on Revolution by the New Bourgeois Class5 Conclusion4 Sampling the “New Historical Fiction”: White Deer Plain as a Representative Text of New Historicism1 A Patriarchal Clan System Consisting of Master-Slave Relationships2 The Opening of the Gate of Desire3 Three Rebels Fighting against Existing Institutions4 Three Political Forces: An Incomprehensive Representation5 A Rebel’s Tragic Ending and the Incompleteness of History6 The Textual Blankness and the Vacancy of Political Belief7 “Cultural-Psychological Structure” and the Culturalist Mentality8 Historical Revisionism and New Historicist Fiction9 Conclusionpart 3: From Post-Revolutionary Passion to Postmodern Consumerism5 Two Kinds of Bildungsroman: On the Avant-Garde Films of China’s Sixth-Generation Auteurs1 Dirt (1992): A Bildungsroman of Youth in the Early 1990s2 The Making of Steel (1997): Why Could the Steel Not Be Successfully Made?3 Conclusion6 “Postmodern” Love Stories: Articulating the Self-Consciousness of the Entrepreneurial Class in China’s Pop Cinema1 A Hedonistic and Yuppy Life Philosophy: Romance on Lushan Mountain 2010 as a Tale of China’s Entrepreneurial Class2 Nihilists and the Pragmatic Principle: So Young (2013) as a Symptomatic “Youth Film”part 4: Middle Class Tastes and Intellectual Trends7 Making a Historical Fable: The Narrative Strategy of Lust, Caution and Its Social Repercussions1 A Précis of the Surface Plotline2 Projection of Social Institutions in Historical Representation3 Displacement of Party Politics by Sexual Politics4 Appropriation of Historical Allegory through Identity Deconstruction5 Conclusion6 Coda8 Social Democracy or Neoliberal Freedom? Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Intellectual Thought1 Dialectics of Postmodernism and (Post-)Nationalism2 Cooperation of Neo-Statism and “Corporatism”3 Conflicts between New Left and New Right4 Outcry for New Socialism and the Urge for Neoliberal Capitalism5 Conclusionpart 5: Cultural Identity and Subjectivity in the Age of Global Capitalism9 The Exploration of “Cultural Politics” and Its Crossroads: On the Discussions of “Chinese Identity” in the Era of Globalization1 Why to Take German Thinkers as the Object of Research?2 Totality and the Dialectics of Historical Materialism3 The Dialectic between Universality and Particularity4 Cultural Diversity and Pluralism5 How to Transcend the Nation-State System and Rebuild Continuity?6 What is Cultural Politics?7 Tensions and Dilemmas: Whose Cultural Politics?8 Conclusion10 Establishing the Subjectivity of Modern Chinese Culture: Zhou Ning’s Research as a Case Study1 Critique of Sinologism and Modern Academic Institutions2 From “Study of the Chinese Image in the West” to “Cross-Cultural Study”3 The Problems of “Self-Orientalization” and “Universal Value”4 The Pitfalls of Genealogical Study and Culturalist Mentality5 Exploring the Subjectivity of Modern Chinese Culture6 ConclusionConclusion: In Search of the Renaissance of China’s Socialist CultureSelected BibliographyIndex