Juxtaposition, Narrative Strategies, And Multimedia Explorations: Representation Of Time In Comics,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Juxtaposition, Narrative Strategies, And Multimedia Explorations: Representation Of Time In Comics, Xu Lian
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Following the tradition of narratology and comics studies, this article explores various ways of representing time in comics and displays the complexity and diversity of temporal representation in the grammar of comics. It focuses on spatialization, closure, order, speed, and innovation enabled by virtue of multimedia explorations. Spatialization strategies such as juxtaposition and collage are basic ways to represent time in comics, and closure of perception is also critical in understanding time. However, new forms like music comics and webcomics have significantly changed the structure of temporal representation.
The New Development Of Marxist Literary Criticism Today: An Interview With Barbara Foley,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The New Development Of Marxist Literary Criticism Today: An Interview With Barbara Foley, Shengzhen Zhang, Barbara Foley
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
This interview with Prof. Barbara Foley covers a wide range of critical approaches and new challenges in the fields of Marxist theory, Marxist literary criticism, and Marxist pedagogy. Prof. Foley holds that Marxism provides a meta-theory, a privileged standpoint from which to study the connections between literature, politics and history. After examining fundamental principles of Marxism － － historical materialism, political economy, and ideology critique － － Foley analyzes long-standing debates over the nature of literature and sets forth key concerns of Marxist literary criticism. This interview also examines a broad range of literary works － － from classical to …
“Poetic Wisdom”Or “Poetic Knowledge”: On The Interlingual Transformation Of “Della Sapienza Poetica”,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
“Poetic Wisdom”Or “Poetic Knowledge”: On The Interlingual Transformation Of “Della Sapienza Poetica”, Weixuan Lin
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
While the term “Poetic wisdom” as the translation of “della Sapienza Poetica” helps to convey the aestheticconnotation of the original, it shadows the meaning of “poetic knowledge” and its epistemological background. Since René Descartes's rationality denied the value of philology, Giovanni Battista Vico tried to use “della Sapienza Poetica” as his method to seek truth in philology, and as his determination to defend philology. When approaching “della Sapienza Poetica” from the perspective of “poetic knowledge," we can understand and justify many of the puzzling arguments in Vico's New Science and give due respect to the concept which lacks among Western …
Third Reading Of Early Film Theory: The Turn To Dispositif, Affect, And Action Comedy,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Third Reading Of Early Film Theory: The Turn To Dispositif, Affect, And Action Comedy, Yingjin Zhang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Early film studies has spread rapidly since the 1990s and become a mainstay in film studies in Euro-American academia, bringing technological innovation, visual culture, and urban modernity into film historiography and thus enriching scholarship in a field previously dominated by close textual reading. This article continues my tracking of early film studies but concentrates on methodological issues of the recent focus on “media archaeology.” My “Reading Early Film Theory: Collective Sensorium and Vernacular Modernism” (2005) introduces Miriam Hansen's theory and Zhen Zhang's book on reconstructing a cultural history of Shanghai film. My follow-up “Rereading Early Film Theory: In Pursuit of …
Imaginations Of The Wei And Jin Dynasties In The Time Of Historical Fracture: Rereading Zong Baihua's "On The Tales Of The World And The Beauty Of The Jin People” In The Context Of The Second Sino-Japanese War,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Imaginations Of The Wei And Jin Dynasties In The Time Of Historical Fracture: Rereading Zong Baihua's "On The Tales Of The World And The Beauty Of The Jin People” In The Context Of The Second Sino-Japanese War, Lang Jin
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Zong Baihua's “On The Tales of the World and the Beauty of the Jin People”is the foundation for research on the aesthetics of the Wei and Jin dynasties. It expounds on the aesthetic spirit in the Wei and Jin dynasties with discourses of "consciousness of personality", which is often traced back to the period of the May Fourth Movement. In fact, this understanding is the result of reinterpretations in the new era. An overlooked fact is that this work was written during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and should be interpreted in the historical and cultural context of this period. The …
Testimony, Narrative, And History: The Plague And Some Issues Of Literature As Testimony,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Testimony, Narrative, And History: The Plague And Some Issues Of Literature As Testimony, Dongfeng Tao
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Albert Camus's The Plague establishes a mode of“literature as historical testimony”and demonstrates a profound shift in the relationship between history and narrative, and it implies that literature ( narrative) is inevitably embedded in history. Literature as a testimony to the Holocaust does not record the Holocaust but also offers a new perspective to understand it. This actualizes the transformation of history as it changes the nature of historical knowledge. The history in The Plague is written in the mode of an allegory, and it establishes a profound metaphorical relation between the plague and the Holocaust. As both the plague and …
Urban Imagination And The Idea Of The Nation-State In Modern Chinese Literature,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Urban Imagination And The Idea Of The Nation-State In Modern Chinese Literature, Yongdong Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Cities and nation-states are both substantive and conceptual. The study of urban imagination in modern Chinese literature needs to go beyond the model that builds on the concept of a uniform city and village. It requires an understanding of the limits in interpreting modernity and cultural perspective, and an emphasis on exploring the polysemy and fluidity of city images. Cities and nation-states constitute a “problem field,”in which the way of looking at and imagining cities are often marked by metaphors of the nation-state. Urban imagination and the idea of the nation-state are mutually illuminative. The expression of the idea of …
Chinese Peking Opera Anthology: A Text-Centered Study Of Peking Opera,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Chinese Peking Opera Anthology: A Text-Centered Study Of Peking Opera, Dongdong Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Since 1880, Peking opera (jingju) anthologies have developed rapidly and collected a large number of plays. Therefore, the text-centered study of jingju based on anthologies has been established, which could fulfil the gap in existing jingju studies that focus on performance. Specifically, by outlining the basic forms and evolutionary rules of the selected texts, we can survey the full picture of text-centered anthologies in development. By foregrounding text-centeredness and literariness of playscripts, we can open up a new field of textual studies beyond the studies of performance. The major aspects of theoretical studies of jingju anthologies include theories of anthology, …
On Wang Yuanhua's Ideas Of Jingju And His Reflection On The May Fourth Movement,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
On Wang Yuanhua's Ideas Of Jingju And His Reflection On The May Fourth Movement, Wei Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
It is extremely meaningful, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Wang Yuanhua's birth, to restudy his ideas of jingju. Wang's thoughts on the revival and development of jingju from the perspective of cultural heritage are highly valuable. He believes that, in terms of moral ideas, jingju is a medium and vehicle in disseminating grand traditions of Chinese culture towards smaller traditions. Meanwhile, considered as a performance system, jingju embodies the“bixing”mindset, the lyrical expression with mind-object interaction, as well as the flexible distance-immersion dynamic among performers and spectators. This results in a complete system of“virtuality, conventionalization, and ideographics”. He …
A Hundred-Year Modern Peking Opera: Practices And Experiences,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
A Hundred-Year Modern Peking Opera: Practices And Experiences, Hengfu Zhu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The hundred-year modern Peking opera (jingju) has gone through three stages. In the first stage, ranging from around 1910 to around 1964, jingju was used as agit-prop. In the second stage from 1964 to 1976, there emerged a series of new forms in acting, music, and stage art, with which theatre practitioners strove to use art to perform revolutionary historical stories or the struggle and construction in the socialist period. The third stage from 1976 to the present is characterized by a thematic departure from“politics”and“revolution”to the portrayal of“nobodies”by focusing on characters' psychology; this stage also features novel and beautiful physical …
Popular Literature And Art, National Forms And The Re-Presentation Of Lyricism,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Popular Literature And Art, National Forms And The Re-Presentation Of Lyricism, Fan Nan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the 1930s and 1940s, debates about“popular literature and art”and“the‘national form’of literature”emerged successively in China. While affirming the popular and national literary forms, the literary form that Chinese intellectuals highly admired served as the“Other”in the debating discourse and thus it has never received positive theoretical account. This article intends to re-present this literary form through an integrated examination of cultural interest, class, and literary form. Thanks to the promotion of the May Fourth New Literature, the radical attitude of petty bourgeois culture and the general conceptualization of enlightenment, this literary form is marked by the surge of lyrical elements. The …
Cabaret Voltaire Or Kabarett Voltaire? Three Breakthroughs Of The Concept Gesamtkunstwerk,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Cabaret Voltaire Or Kabarett Voltaire? Three Breakthroughs Of The Concept Gesamtkunstwerk, Duozhi Chen
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The birthplace of Dadaism in Switzerland is often simply translated into Chinese as “Voltaire Pub”. As an art salon, it actually finds its prototype in artists' pubs in Germany. The word “Cabaret” translated as “pub”, is also the general term for the entertaining variety shows therein,which originated in France. After its introduction into the German-speaking area, Cabaret became Kabarett and its cultural connotations and ways of presentations underwent great changes due to its collision with the avant-garde movement. Therefore, the simplified understanding of Cabaret as a pub downplays the significance of the Cabaret Voltaire in the history of modern art. …
Recoding Postmodernist Art Criticism: The Debate Between Anti-Pluralism And Pluralism,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Recoding Postmodernist Art Criticism: The Debate Between Anti-Pluralism And Pluralism, Juanjuan Yang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
While pluralism is considered politically correct today, this article tries to describe the trajectory of anti-pluralist criticism through some famous authors of October, specifically Hal Foster, who edited the seminal Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. In the beginning of the 1980s, Foster categorized two types of postmodernism, one being the postmodernism of reaction and neo-conservatism, the other being postmodernism of resistance and post-structuralism. Aligning with the latter of the two types, major authors of October published a series of important essays to criticize “mainstream postmodernist art, ” especially neo-expressionist paintings. However, during the same period, Arthur Danto claimed“the end of …
Writing Of Futurity: On Derrida's Hauntology,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Writing Of Futurity: On Derrida's Hauntology, Yun Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida answers the post-Levinasian question: how to respond to the Other. He claims that The Communist Manifesto has become an injunction of Marx, who requires our response. We have to respond to it and speak, as Marx does, in a non-metaphysical way. Since it is beyond the economy of re-presentation, writing does not produce presence. Thus, everything in it is spectral. But it takes us into l＇avenir or futurity, a "spacing ( and) temporizing" different from the space-time produced by re-presentation, because it constitutes an "ethicality" which goes beyond the metaphysical subjective conquest of the …
Post-Structural Theories And Chinese Feminist Criticism: On The Theorization Of Women's “Subjectivity” In The Cultural Studies Of Socialist China,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Post-Structural Theories And Chinese Feminist Criticism: On The Theorization Of Women's “Subjectivity” In The Cultural Studies Of Socialist China, Xi Liu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Centering on the conceptualization of "subjectivity," this article first traces the post-structural theories' impact on as well as their complex relationship with Western feminism. It then explores the development of the theorization of “women 's subjectivity" in academic research on Chinese women and gender discourses in socialist China from the 1980s. By examining the application of three influential theorists, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, in the Chinese context, this article intends to show the complex genealogy of "appropriating" post-structural theories for different agendas of contemporary Chinese feminist criticism. Some scholars integrated post-structural ideas into liberal-humanist discourses; some employed …
Narrative Of Habitus Distinction: From Fantasy Of Identity To Competition Of Elegance——Centering On The Image Of People Subject To Identity Transformations In Modern Fictions,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Narrative Of Habitus Distinction: From Fantasy Of Identity To Competition Of Elegance——Centering On The Image Of People Subject To Identity Transformations In Modern Fictions, Daizong Yu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Sociological or anthropological list of the habitus of people are from different classes, focusing on the strategy and function of habitus distinction in social struggles from the perspectives of political culture, economic level, and intergenerational reproduction. In contrast, modern fictions depict different forms of struggles from the perspectives of perceptual experience, emotional change, and taste preference. The narrative of habitus distinction in modern fictions shows the obstinacy of old habitus, the fragility of new habitus, and the aggressiveness of habitus in the struggles of classification. Its insight and aesthetic interpretation provide not only a more precise way but also a …
Socialist-Realist Art From The Perspective Of Gaze Theory: An Inquiry From Filmology To Iconology,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Socialist-Realist Art From The Perspective Of Gaze Theory: An Inquiry From Filmology To Iconology, Ying Lu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
"Socialist-realist gaze," linking gaze and socialist realist literary thoughts, refers to the visual communication of heroic figures on the external points off the screen in shooting Chinese revolutionary films. Such gaze, being invisible and with shared sight, returns to Jacques Lacan's gaze theory because of its intersubjective functioning. During its generation and function, socialist-realist gaze breaks the limitation of pictorial space, extends the boundary of screen as a "quilting point," and connects characters and audiences with ideological truth. As a performative image behavior, it arouses and strengthens the empathy between the viewers and the hero.
Fables Agreed Upon: A Comparative Study Of New Historicism And Alternate History,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Fables Agreed Upon: A Comparative Study Of New Historicism And Alternate History, Feng Li, Yitzhak Lewis
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
New Historicism and alternate history raise similar questions regarding history and ideology. New Historicism reads every text as an alternate history narrative, while the narrative mode in alternate history can inspire a nuanced understanding of the critical positions promoted by New Historicism. The paper offers a comparative study of the two in terms of their conceptualizations of historical narrative, intertextuality, narrativity, non-linear structure and spatiality. It seeks to create dialogues between different voices in both the critical theory and the literary genre with respect to their attention to mundane matters, their allusions to the present and projections of the future, …
“Birth Of New Things From Old Things”: The Dialectics Of Ding Ling's “Transformation” In The Left-Wing Literature Movement During The 1930s,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
“Birth Of New Things From Old Things”: The Dialectics Of Ding Ling's “Transformation” In The Left-Wing Literature Movement During The 1930s, Shujie Wu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Written in the summer of 1931, Ding Ling's Flood is considered to represent her turn to the left-wing. This was the result of Ding Ling's transformation in thought and the construction in the organized movement of the League of Left-wing Writers. With the dialectical materialist method of creation, Feng Xuefeng reinterpreted Flood, turning it into a practice of the "November Resolution". This established new space of discourse and path of practice for the cultural struggle of left-wing writers in the new situation.
A Study Of The Relationship Between Zhou Zuoren And Takeuchi Yoshimi As An Overseas Student In Beijing,
2021
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
A Study Of The Relationship Between Zhou Zuoren And Takeuchi Yoshimi As An Overseas Student In Beijing, Wanming Liu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
From 1937 to 1939, Takeuchi Yoshimi studied in Beijing as an overseas student. During this time, he had adeveloped deep understanding of literature's inefficacy when confronted with Japanese invaders＇ political violence. At the sametime, through befriending Zhou Zuoren, Takeuchi was deeply affected by him, especially regarding his views on the relationshipbetween literature and politics, national character, cultural subjectivity, and modernization of East Asia. In the end, Zhou Zuoren became a bridge for Takeuchi Yoshimi to Lu Xun. By using the two key words, "ghost" and "sorrow of the East Asia people", to connect Zhou Zuoren and Lu Xun, Takeuchi expressed …
