scholarly journals Novel, Film and the Art of Translational Storytelling: Dai Sijie's Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-379
Author(s):  
Shuangyi Li
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Chinese Tradition ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Literary Aesthetic ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Abstract This article examines the novel and film Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise, by the Franco-Chinese writer and filmmaker Dai Sijie, the story of which takes place against the background of the Cultural Revolution. The first part of my analysis will make clear how the film illuminates and dramatizes the special texture, aesthetic and structure of the novel, highlighting the cinematic sensibility of Dai’s literary aesthetic. I then move on to investigate the linguistic aspects of the various translations between the novel and the film in French, Mandarin Chinese and Sichuanese. The aesthetic effects of dubbing, in particular, will allow me to investigate new possibilities of reading exophone literature. Finally, this paper highlights the central role of oral storytelling in the Chinese tradition in/through various forms of translation: interlingual as well as intermedial. In so doing, this article aims to add nuance to and enrich current debates on issues such as intercultural misreading and exoticism in Dai’s works.

scholarly journals The Logical Basis of a Literary Text, or What Does Porfiry Petrovich Hide in F. M. Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”?

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-259
Author(s):  
Valentina E. Vetlovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Literary Text ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Logical Basis ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual

<p>The article explores the role of logical connections in an epic text. It is these connections, according to the author of the article, that connect the individual components of the narrative (motifs, complexes of motifs) and make up in the reader&rsquo;s perception for the missing elements. The reticence and failures to mention, common in fiction, appear in the narrative for various reasons. Sometimes due to the aesthetic principles of the writer who prefers ambiguity to a completed statement depriving readers of the opportunity to finish thinking over a vague idea. And sometimes, due to the author&rsquo;s conviction that there is no need to explain the idea implied by what has been earlier said. But it also happens that the omissions in the narrative are engendered by the requirements for the presentation of a chosen topic, for example in crime fiction. But these reasons may go together as it occurs in Crime and Punishment. These ideas are illustrated by the analysis of one of the themes of the novel Crime and Punishment.</p>

Statistics and the Field Army Loyalty System

1974 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 146-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
William W. Whitson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Chinese Politics ◽  
Previous Issue ◽  
Chinese Military ◽  
Military Politics ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Although many readers would probably interpret William Parish's article in the previous issue of The China Quarterly (“Factions in Chinese Military Politics,” CQ, No. 56, pp. 667–699) as an attack on my 1969 assessment of the historic role of the Field Army in post-1950 Chinese politics, I am nevertheless sincerely grateful to him for keeping the dialogue about “loyalty systems” alive. Indeed, I am struck by the irony of our respective positions. He seems to argue that, while the Field Army loyalty system apparently (according to my statistics) had little demonstrable impact on elite assignments before the Cultural Revolution, the same system apparently (according to his statistics) helps clarify factional behaviour within the PLA during and after the Cultural Revolution. The irony of this is doubled since the statistical evidence which I now have available argues that “the old boy net” of the Field Armies actually had a diminishing impact on the domestic politics of China in the late 1960s. By then the Military Region as a geo-political unit had replaced the Field Army as a temporary focus of individual and collective PLA loyalties.

scholarly journals Mummifying the Working Class: The Cultural Revolution and the Fates of the Political Parties of the 20th Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. 653-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Russo
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Working Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractA number of prolonged political experiments in Chinese factories during the Cultural Revolution proved that, despite any alleged “historical” connection between the Communist Party and the “working class,” the role of the workers, lacking a deep political reinvention, was framed by a regime of subordination that was ultimately not dissimilar from that under capitalist command. This paper argues that one key point of Deng Xiaoping's reforms derived from taking these experimental results into account accurately but redirecting them towards the opposite aim, an even more stringent disciplining of wage labour. The outcome so far is a governmental discourse which plays an important role in upholding the term “working class” among the emblems of power, while at the same time nailing the workers to an unconditional obedience. The paper discusses the assumption that, while this stratagem is one factor behind the stabilization of the Chinese Communist Party, it has nonetheless affected the decline of the party systems inherited from the 20th century.

scholarly journals The Fragility of Identity and the Imagination of Otherness in Bai Hua’s novel The Remote Country of Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-91
Author(s):  
Tânia Ganito ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Chinese Author ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Drawing on The Remote Kingdom of Women (1988), the novel written by Chinese author Bai Hua (1930-2019), this essay examines how post-Mao China articulated the notions of memory and identity, as well as of belonging and othering, as an attempt to overcome the state of fragility caused by the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the post-revolutionary growing influence of Western culture. It proposes to explore the way some of the literary works produced during this period were to promote an encounter between a fragmented yet hegemonic culture and the cultures of the internal ethnic Other, and how this encounter between majority and minority subjects was to highlight precisely the condition of fragility that underlies the very concept of identity. Keywords: China; Literature; Bai Hua; Identity; Majority; Minorities.

scholarly journals MUSICAL LIFE OF CHUVASHIA IN THE EARLY 1930s

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 98-105
Author(s):  
Andrey V. Mankov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Radio Broadcasting ◽  
Symphonic Orchestra ◽  
15Th Anniversary ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Soviet Music ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The article studies the main directions of musical life of Chuvashia at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the USSR in the 1930s. The issues of the journal “Soviet music” were used as a historic source. The article, in particular, tells about the achievements of the Republic in creating the national culture within the framework of the Cultural Revolution which were demonstrated in the days of celebrating in 1935 the 15th anniversary of the Chuvash autonomous region formation. At this, the author pays special attention to the role of Cheboksary music college in forming the musical arts of the region and which became the center of musical life in Chuvashia. The article describes the creative activities of the leading music workers and composers of the Republic of the studied period (S.M. Maksimov, V.M. Krivonosov). The conclusion is made about undoubted successes in the development of musical culture of Chuvashia in the early 1930s. It adopted more modern forms at those times. Thus, in these years in the Chuvash territory the first major musical compositions in the Chuvash language are created. In the republic there were a symphonic orchestra and a state choir, music radio broadcasting was created. Composers from Chuvashia became known both at home and abroad where their songs were performed. Composers actively studied the Chuvash musical folklore.

Overture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xing Fan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The author refutes the flawed assumption that artistry was sacrificed to politics, or that there is not much art left, in model works. The author situates the study of model jingju at the intersection of three contexts: historic, comprising its original form—the jingju that originated in the late eighteenth century—and its revolutionary trajectory under the CCP from the Yan’an period (1935–1947) to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); artistic, encompassing the artistic choices in the five major aspects—playwriting, acting, music, design, and directing—and their practical application in mounting the final productions; and aesthetic, addressing the interrelation and interaction among the major artistic aspects which produce and define model jingju’s style, including its conformity to and deviation from the aesthetic principles of jingju. The author calls for close attention to practitioners and their lived experience of creating model jingju.

Wounds of the Past: the Chuanju Performance of Qingtan (Sighing)

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (03) ◽  
pp. 221-237
Author(s):  
Lin Chen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Past ◽  
Deep Wound ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

In this article Lin Chen seeks to locate the experimental chuanju production Qingtan (Sighing), directed by and starring Tian Mansha, in its special socio-political context. Based on a detailed performance analysis, she explores the aesthetics of the production and how it interweaves different performance cultures while referring continually to the deep wound of the Cultural Revolution, still felt by a significant number of ordinary people in mainland China. But while the production fully intends to present the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, it barely touches the wound of the past that it evokes. This is so because of the pervading presence of the xiqu idea of beauty, current dualistic political discourse, institutional difficulties, and, most of all, the fact that the collective cultural trauma at issue has not yet been properly articulated in Chinese culture and society. Lin Chen is an assistant professor of the Qingdao Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shandong University. She completed her doctorate at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her research interests include the aesthetic ideas of Leibniz and their far-reaching influence, the aesthetics of performativity, interweaving performance cultures and cultural studies.1

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