2019 Vol. 2, No. 1

Display Method:
From the “1985 New Wave” to the Age of Image-Capital: On Protection of Chinese Painting and Self-Cultivation and the Acquisition of an Encyclopedic Knowledge of Art by Chinese Painters and Calligraphers
YANG Naiqiao
2019, 2(1): 7-58.
Abstract:
The year 1985 witnessed the first blossoming of contemporary Chinese literature and art since the end of the Cultural Revolution.In 1985, Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House began to arrange for the publication of Collected Paintings of Huang Binhong and Letters of Huang Binhong.While working as an editor on the project,the calligrapher and painter DENG Ming conceived the idea of"using the method of the ancients'ink and wash to draw a picture for the ancients,"and was going to follow it through in the next thirtytwo years.From conservativism to avant-gardism,DENG's idea was given contrasting labels as the tide turned;it finally materialized in A History of One Hundred Great Masters:Chinese Ink and Wash Painting,a period image history of Chinese painting.From "Scar Literature," "Reflection Literature," "RootSeeking Literature," and the"1985 New Wave,"to the age of image-capital in the post-New Age,literature and art have developed in tandem in the same historical contexts and stimulated diverse thoughts.Yet,for many years,disciplinary boundaries have isolated literature from various forms of arts,limiting each to a soliloquy within the field of its own,so much so that the wholistic historical background shared by literature and art was broken to pieces.This article situates an idea about ink and wash painting that remains unchanged for thirty-two years in a historical coordinate plane with the"1985 New Wave"as the origin point. Thus set up,it seeks to visualize and understand the development of contemporary Chinese literature and art in the past forty years——a period that spans the New Age and the post-New Age——with a particular focus on the predicaments faced by the art market in the age of image-capital.It argues that the contemporary fine arts field in China is,to a large extent,controlled by the capital,which dismantles the non-instrumental value of art.Therefore,it maintains,that it would be a precious virtue of the artist to consciously resist capital,cultivate learning,and acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of art.
The Muted Lover and the Singing Poet: Ekphrasis and Gender in the Canzoniere
ZHONG Bili
2019, 2(1): 59-74.
Abstract:
Ekphrasis,a poetic genre termed as the "verbal representation of the visual representation" that reflects the relationship between word and image,plays an important role in the field of gender study.In ekphrasis,word/ the male is said to dominate over or to suppress the silent image/the female. Petrarch's ekphrastic description of Laura has a strong tendency of fetishism in the Canzoniere.Laura is always presented in the poetry as some fragmental parts: pearl,gold,rose,snow,etc.This obsessively ekphrastic writing shows Petrarch's ambition and desire to "objectify" his lover,making her forever stagnant as a mute artwork that bears the gaze from the male.Unlike a lively lover that can interact with Petrarch,Laura is turned into an idol,an object out of reach but is always seized by the erotic gaze of the poet.In his project of objectifying Laura, the poet created his sol una donna1.However,realizing the insubstantiality of language,he found that his empty words of poetics could never bring Laura to her presence.The forever absence of Laura,in turn,stimulates his desire to create an infinite number of sign-substitutions that eventually distort the feminine image.
Where does Poetry Take Place? On Tensions in the Concept of a National Art
Paul Magee
2019, 2(1): 75-93.
Abstract:
Why do we regularly resort to national labels and locations ("One of Ireland's best contemporary poets," "An American poet of the 1950s," "Born in Spain in 1927,in the province of Cadíz") when discussing the work of poets?The article takes the pervasive tendency to badge contemporary poetry in geopolitical terms as starting point for a discussion of the difficult and at times antithetical relation between that artform and national imagining.It focusses this discussion on an archive of 75 Anglophone poets'responses to a suite of questions about national and other forms of affiliation.The interviews were collected by the author and his colleagues in the course of their work on the 2013-2015 Australian Research Council funded project Understanding Creative Excellence:A Case-Study in Poetry.The article contextualises passages from the interviews through recent sociological work on the way contemporary subjects are called upon to assume an identity as national (Brubaker 2009 and 2015;Casanova 2005;Malešević 2011).The searching nature of poetic utterance provides a touchstone throughout.Where does poetry take place?
Jean Racine and Ancient Greek Tragedy
WU Yaling
2019, 2(1): 94-107.
Abstract:
The relation between the seventeenth-century French dramatist and the tragedian of ancient Greece has received scant critical attention,though four of Jean Racine's plays are largely based on works by Euripides.Yet before he claims to be the only disciple of Euripides in Iphigenia's preface,Racine considers the works of Sophocles as the perfect example of tragedy.Through a careful study of Racine's dramatic works,polemical essays,correspondence and specially his early notes on Greek authors,this article tries to examine this change of attitude that may have a connection with Racine's reference and application of Aristotle's Poetics.
The Trauma of Another: The Female Body and National Victimhood
HUANG Junliang
2019, 2(1): 108-118.
Abstract:
This paper discusses the nationalization of individual victimhood in literary works on the Asia-Pacific War. Taking a comparative approach, it focuses on the traumatized female body, its revelation as well as its suppression, in wartime and postwar literary narratives in Japan and China. Looking into the politics of the female victim’s traumatized body in some influential literary works set in wartime Japan and China, I argue that in both countries, the discourses of the war are imprinted with a gendered mark in the self-claimed victimhood of the nation that represents and reveals itself through the victimhood of its women. Such practices always sacrifice a subtle and affective reading of those wounds for some greater purposes or meanings for the sake of the patriarchal nation.
On the Modern Chinese Liberalist Poetics’ Mode of Resource Allocation
ZHANG Huijia
2019, 2(1): 119-129.
Abstract:
As an important force in the modern Chinese poetics field, modern Chinese liberalist poetics has developed a set of independent and systematic poetic theory, and the poetic theory originated from the intellectuals’ two-way gathering and creative integration of Chinese and western poetics resources. Specifically, on the one hand, they absorbed helpful western poetic resources horizontally. On the other hand, they take in Chinese traditional poetic resources longitudinally, and then allocated both the Chinese and western resources creatively, thus realizing the localization of western resources and the modernization of the Chinese traditional resources.
The Introduction of Chinese Learning to the West and Early Translations of the Classic Chinese Novels (1735-1911): With a Focus on the English World
CHEN Tingting, WANG Xiao
2019, 2(1): 133-136.
Abstract:
Space in Art History
YUAN Jing
2019, 2(1): 137-140.
Abstract:
The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World
HUANG Yanjie
2019, 2(1): 141-144.
Abstract: