Writing terror: Crises of historical testimony in twentieth-century Chinese literature and film

My task in this study is to trace the relation between violence and redemption in twentieth-century Chinese narrative literature. Modern Chinese works have often focused on extreme cases of violence, such as mutilation, beheading and cannibalism. At the same time, the texts express concern with literature's mission to counter social injustice. I argue that the depiction of brutality does not merely result from the "reflection" of a cruel events or even from the wish to raise readers' consciousness to brutal reality. The description of violence may also convey the author's doubts of his ability to communicate his vision to society.; I trace the linkage between violence and redemption to the paradoxes of modernity. "Modernity" has often been presented as a new era of freedom from natural disasters and man-made barbarism. The representation of violence foregrounds the patent failure of the redemptive claim of modernity. The texts at hand address the authors' crisis when they respond to the inner demand to support the faith in modernity. In their writings, "modernity" paradoxically becomes the sign that negates the expression of historical experience. Instead, the writers testify to their doubts in the value of modern community, which fails to sustain their communicative act.; I cover texts spanning the entire twentieth century, from Lu Xun's early short stories, through May Fourth plays, left-wing cinema of the thirties, Taiwanese stories of the mid-eighties, to the "scar literature" and "avant-garde fiction" of the late 1980s. Reading closely works considered representative of their times, I propose that the utopian streak in what C. T. Hsia calls the "obsession with China" has been accompanied by a dystopian drive that stresses the potential of writing to inflict harm upon both author and readership and to pull them apart from one another. The texts form a consistent discourse and invent a modern tradition.