Used by Classical and Medieval Western scholars to teach rhetoric, a chreia is a brief moral story attributed to a famous historical figure. In Late Ming China, the Italian Jesuit Alfonso Vagnone, also named Gao Yizhi, and the Chinese scholar-official Han Yun collaborated on a project to write down 355 chreia and sayings. These short commentaties are not mere translations of the Grecoroman text but the elaborate literary creations of two luminaries working at the junction between Chinese and Western wisdom literature. Along with the original Chinese and its English translation (the original source is included when available) the authors share their expert analysis of each chreia. This study will interest scholars across disciplines: Chinese literature, Comparative literature, Sinology, Chinese thought, Christian studies, Western classics and Moral Philosophy.
In the early 1990s, Berlin and Shanghai witnessed the dramatic social changes in both national and global contexts. While in 1991 Berlin became the new capital of the reunified Germany, from 1992 Shanghai began to once again play its role as the most powerful engine of economic development in the post-1989 China. This critical moment of history has fundamentally transformed the later development of both cities, above all in terms of urban spatial order. The construction mania in Shanghai and Berlin shares the similar aspriration of "re-modernizing" themselves. In this sense, the current experience of Shanghai and Berlin informs many of the features of urban modernity in the post-Cold-War era. The book unfolds the complexity of the urban space per se as highly revealing cultural texts. Also this project doesn't examine the spatial changes in chronological terms, but rather takes the present moment as the temporal standing point of this research. By comparing the memory discourse related to these spatial changes, the book poses the question of how modernity is understood in the matrix of local, national and global power struggles.
Der Artikel zeichnet die literarischen Strategien und Themen des Erinnerns und Vergessens nach und stellt die Frage nach der Gegenwart der Kulturrevolution. Inwiefern sind Kunst und Literatur Komplizen der politisch gewollten Verdrängung? Wie sehen die literarischen Gegenentwürfe zur offiziellen Meistererzählung aus? Welche Rolle spielen Kunst und Literatur in der Erinnerungspolitik der VR China?
In contrast to history, which strives for a neutral and objective stance from which to narrate the past, literature can be thought of as multifunctional when it comes to traumatic history: as healing by restoring meaning where it has been destroyed, as subversive by telling counter-histories of the master-narrative, as complementary by integrating suppressed voices and painful experiences into the collective memory or as disturbing by narrating trauma as a persisting condition that continues into the present. This article looks into literary representations of trauma that make use of different narrative modes to deal with collective trauma in 20th-century China and to reconstruct the past. In order to understand the relationship of historical trauma and collective memory and to show the way in which memory relates to the past and how far memory shapes collective identity of the present, the concepts of communicative and cultural memory by Jan and Aleida Assman have proved to be useful.
Irmy Schweiger zeichnet in ihrem Beitrag nach, welche Rolle Literatur bei der Konstruktion einer neuen taiwanesischen Identität und Geschichte sowie Zukunftsvorstellung seit der Demokratisierung der1990er Jahre spielt. Im Zentrum steht dabei die 2018 erschienene Anthologie Ein Jahrhundert : Taiwanliteratur in Geschichten 1900–2000. Dieses große Kollektivprojekt nimmt auch japanische AutorInnen aus der Kolonialzeit (1895–1945) in den Kanon auf, ebensowie chinesische AutorInnen, die auf Japanisch schrieben, oder vergessene SchriftstellerInnen, die in den 1950er Jahren unterder Diktatur der Guomindang verfolgt wurden. Es entstünden, argumentiert Schweiger, vielschichtige, ambivalente und brüchige Bilder taiwanesischer Identitäten und Geschichten. Darin sieht Schweiger ein zukunftsweisendes Potenzial für ein zivilgesellschaftliches Kollektivverständnis Taiwans.
Denna artikel ägnas åt ”fenomenet Liu Xiaobo” genom att använda begreppen frånvaro och närvaro vilka å ena sidan är oförenliga och å andra sidan ömsesidigt beroende av varandra. Hur kan vi tänka kring närvarande frånvaro? I vilken mån bekräftar eller omöjliggör de varandra? Eftersom Liu Xiaobo framförallt blev känd genom sin frånvaro, kommer första delen av artikeln att spåra några av Liu Xiaobos olika liv, vilka är mycket väldokumenterade i flera intervjuer, sina mer än ett dussin böcker och hundratals texter, där han faktiskt var väldigt närvarande. Andra delen följer hans frånvarande liv – vilket i början kännetecknas av statligt sponsrat försvinnande och som slutgiltigt ledde till den yttersta frånvaron – och hur dessa tomrum han lämnade fylldes av olika individer och intressegrupper med egna tolkningar av vad de ansåg vara frånvarande.
This chapter has a threefold agenda. First, it aims at positioning Taiwanese American writer Shawna Yang Ryan and her literary work in the context of literary Taiwan, illustrating how identity policy, transpacific politics, and national desire intersect. Second, it demonstrates how the February 28, 1947 “impact event”—key to Ryan’s Taiwan-oriented novel Green Island—is charged with perceptual patterns that share at least three common features: a national trauma, a forced collective amnesia and, a history of betrayal. Third, it shows how Green Island employs family history to reanimate and interact with these cultural patterns by embracing and reconfiguring the traumatic experiences of the generation of witnesses/victims from a transgenerational and transnational perspective. Her ideology-oriented narrative not only formulates ethical concerns and builds a future-oriented historical consciousness, but it also creates a transpacific space from which the trans/formation of Taiwanese American identity can be negotiated against the background of trans/national history.
In The Landscape of Historical Memory. The Politics of Museums and Memorial Culture in Post-Martial Law Taiwan,Kirk A. Denton, a professor of Chinese literature at The Ohio State University, traverses this rough terrain of post-martial-law Taiwan and guides us meticulously through a varied selection of lieux de mémoire with a focus on museums. Perfectly equipped with his well-documented expertise in the literary, visual, and memorial culture of Greater China, Denton reads museums and other manifestations of memorial culture as texts of political and ideological complicity and contestation. Detailing the intricate negotiations proceeding their construction, interpreting and contextualizing their exhibits, Denton takes us on a fascinating journey through a collective and politically sanctioned historical narrative turned into steel and stone.
In Europe traumatic experiences as part of collective memories find a public form in monuments and rituals. The remembrance of collective traumatic experiences is ritualized in order to provide people to mourn the dead, to express their solidarity with those who lost their relatives or friends, to cherish their own survival or to show respect to those who sacrificed their lives for a common cause. Traumatic events are also written into narratives, so that those who did not experience the trauma themselves have the chance to remember the concreteness of the events. Most important, monuments and rituals as well as visual and written narratives are used not only to educate people but to re/define an identity on the basis of the collective acknowledgement of the misdoings in the past.
In China official historiography gives us no account of any traumatic experience in Chinese history. Up until recently Chinese students were basically instructed to look at 20th century’s China with pride and optimism but above all to look ahead into a promising future. Despite the fact that official historiography is however dull and boring, without ”real” heroes or victims, with no details for what ”really” happend, this master narrative – which reads either as a success story for the CCP’s claim for power or as a story of national humiliation – seems to be powerful and integrative. In my paper I investigate two different literary concepts of dealing with a traumatic past in 20th century China. The first concept is basically driven by the urge to testify, to add the true story of the people to official history. The second concept is detached from first-hand experience or a specific historical traumatic experience. However, both approaches are perceived of as part of communicative memory that aims at turning a traumatic experience into a “meaningful past”.
Book Review:
百年降生 1900-2000 台灣文學故事
[100 Years of Taiwan Literature: 1900-2000]
Edited by 李時雍 Lee Suyon
台北市:聯經出版公司 [Taipei: Linking Publishing], 2018ISBN: 9789570851649