Corporeal reform: Figuring the body in contemporary Chinese narrative

Binbin Fu, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation investigates representations of the body in a number of fictional texts in contemporary China. Engaging modern Western theories of the body in a specific historical context, I explore the ways in which the body, in its intricate relationship with the Dengist symbolic field, emerges as a significant material locus for sociopolitical and cultural transformations in the New Era (1979–1989). Post-Mao literature and culture have received increasing critical attention in recent Chinese and Western scholarship, yet the complex narrative representations of the body in this period remain under-explored. This project attempts to contribute to the study of this significant subject. I begin my discussion by viewing fictional representations of the body in the Dengist symbolic field where Maoist legacy, Dengist ideology of reforms, the intellectual elite's cultural campaigns for reevaluating Chinese modernity, and the emergence of global capitalist economy entwine to signify a complicated history of social transformations, and identify in Chapter 1 three concrete conjunctions of the body with politics, history, and sexuality as interrelated sites of social metamorphoses. Chapter 2 analyzes representations of the wounded individual bodies as a trauma of Maoist politics in Zhang Xianliang, Yu Hua, and Can Xue. I argue that these narratives of the wounded, from redemptive to abject, signify a gradual disintegration of Maoism in the reform decade. Chapter 3 discusses the body as an alternative construction site for rewriting history among “xungen” (root-seeking) and “experimental fiction” writers. I look specifically at how Han Shaogong, Mo Yan, and Su Tong use bodily carnival and grotesquerie to subvert the mainstream “History” and to cultivate a new chronotope for alternative cultural imagination. Chapter 4 concentrates on the body as a psycho-sexual space engendered by the emergence of global capitalism. Reading the sexual bodies represented in Wang Anyi, Ge Fei, and Chen Ran, I examine the ways in which libidinal energy, previously controlled by Maoism, is re-channeled to establish a private space for the postrevolutionary individual.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lai, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Asian literature

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