Abstracts Category : Other

The Wild Individual| Politics and Aesthetics of Realism in Post-Mao China (1977-1984)

by Jun Xie

This dissertation attempts to examine Chinese realist novels (novellas) flourishing in the transitional period between Maos era and post-Mao era (1976-1984). This period, rarely explored in English-speaking academia, constitutes a critical site to understand the social and cultural transformation from socialist to post-socialist China and to study the individual newly formed in that period whose influence continues to shape todays China. By looking into realist novels, my research attempts to understand this social change and the historical construction of an individual subject distinct from both the human subject conceptualized in the socialist realism in Maos era and the bourgeois individual in the 19th century European Realism. Realist novels, which opened a textual space for social imagination in a liminal period, undertook the role of creating a life-world of post-socialist China with its mimetic and critical function, thus launching another cultural revolution immediately following the ending of Maos Cultural Revolution. The main body of my research consists of the analysis of three sub-genresEnlightenment fiction (Chapter One), humanist fiction (Chapter Two) and peasants fiction (Chapter Three), each corresponding respectively to political subject, aesthetic subject and economic subject. The dissertation will show how the enlightenment subject, Kantian subjectivity and persona economicus reinvigorated in these fictional imaginations. However, it was also a period in which all these newly constructed myths of subject were pressed to meet their internal limits which led to their ineluctable dissolution. This was due to the emergence of the wild individual, for example, we can detect the terrifying unrestrained desire of lower class that participated in the discursive formation of the autonomous subject and we can detect the anxiety caused by the accumulation of capital even in the overall optimistic narrative of peasants literature.