The spectacle of xiangtu: Home, landscape and national representation in modern Chinese literature, film and art.
详细信息
文摘
Xiangtu, a compound term of the rural, one's native home, and land, is one of the most important keywords in the lexicology of modern China that captures the national imagination throughout the twentieth century. Taking the complexity of xiangtu as a point of departure, the current study examines its heterogeneous representations in the changing trajectory of modern Chinese literature and culture (including films and paintings in the 1980s) roughly from 1919 to 1989. Rather than treating the representation of xiangtu as a literary movement, I address competing representations of xiangtu as a discursive practice in a conflicting field of power and ideology in modern Chinese history. By drawing on recent theories of landscape studies, nationalism, visual culture, and cultural geography, this study examines how the discourse of xiangtu is imagined and appropriated as a national symbolic that both affirms and questions the discourse of Xiangtu Zhongguo.;Chapter One is an archaeological study of the cult of xiangtu in modern China from the literary, cultural, and social-political perspectives, tracing the volatile formation of its discursive complexity. Chapters Two and Three investigate cognitive mappings of the homescape and the native place, exploring in an intercultural perspective how hometowns and rural scenes become the site of contending identities in an era of tempo-spatial dislocation in the works of Lu Xun (1919), Shen Congwen (1934/1936), Zhang Chengzhi (1982), Han Shaogong (1985), Mo Yan (1985), Thomas Hardy (1878), and Raymond Williams (1960). Chapters Four and Five examine heterogeneous topographies of the river landscape in the works of Zhang Chengzhi (1984), Haizi and Luo Yihe (1985), Zhengyi (1986), Zhang Wei (1986), Su Xiaokang (1988). I suggest that the eruption of river discourse in Chinese literature, art and film in the 1980s actually reveals the contending dreamworks that are negotiated in the process of re-visioning national identity and subjectivity in post-Mao China. The thesis concludes by rethinking the significance of xiangtu in a trans-national, global context.