| This dissertation aims to accomplish a reconfiguration of the idea of individuality in modern Chinese literature from Zhou Zuoren's "Humane Literature" (1918) to Mao Zedong's "Yan'an Talkss on Art and Literature" (1942). Through a rereading of several famous texts in the history of modern Chinese literature, this dissertation attempts to refresh the understanding of individuality and the individual in literature, showing different cultural-political possibilities and potentialities contained in the individual.;While the Chinese term corresponding to the English word "individual", "geren", was imported from Japan in the late nineteenth century, during the process of translation and introduction of the Japanese translations of modern Western political theories there surfaces an unphenomenalizable discrepancy between the logical term "individual" and the highly politicized term "geren". Without critically thematized, the seemingly innocent phrasing of "geren" (literally means "(one) piece of man") valorizes the way in which Chinese readers and critics identified and discussed "individuals" in the literary texts under examination, leaving intact the crucial underlying theoretical framework that determines the individual, i.e., the political reciprocal relationship between the individual and the state (or the collective). Focusing on the discrepancy between the cultural-politically stabilized correspondence of "individual/geren" and the literary configurations of the individual, then, this dissertation begins with a critical rereading of Zhou Zuoren's "The Human Literature", a text that was fundamental for the New Culture Movement in the late 1910s and paved a crucial way for the so-called "literary revolution" through a justification heavily depending on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the relation between the individual and humanity per se. Following the reading of Zhou Zuoren are a reinterpretation of Lu Xun's story "The Diary of a Madman" (1918) and Xiao Hong's novel The Field of Life and Death (1934), where I argue that the literary individual, as unstable as it is indistinguishable from the animal in these texts, points not towards any particular politics, but towards writing itself. The next chapter on Lao She's Camel-Xiangzi (1936), then, shows the extent to which the radicality of the literary individual exceeds the scope of realist representation, imploding the apparatus of "representationalism" (Theodore Huters) that is said to be characteristic of modern Chinese literature. Chapter Four associates Lao She's ironical narrative with the practice of fragmentary writing of the New Perceptionism, where the problematic of individual(ity) is critically placed at the level of touch, body, and the materiality of literature. To the same thread of thought, I argue, belongs Lu Xun's late "zawen", two pieces of which are closely read in Chapter Five. And it is in the late Lu Xun's case the literary configuration of the individual is detached from the representational and the representative, resonating with the unrepresentable being that is "being-with". Its flip-side, which I call "relationless relation", is examined in "Intermezzo II", where a rereading of Lu Xun's short story "Hometown" (1921) implies a nonsubstantial, asymmetrical relationship.;The dissertation ends with a reading of Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yan'an Forum of Literature and Art" (1942), whose authority and influence makes it that the space of literature during and after the 1940s is strictly determined. Mao's "talk", I argue, is crucially but implicitly hinged on a particular configuration of the individual in literature. |
