Jing Wang. High culture fever : politics, aesthetics, and ideology in Deng\u27s China; Jing Wang, ed. China\u27s avant-garde fiction : an anthology

This article reviews the books High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng\u27s China written by Jing Wang and China\u27s Avant-Garde Fiction: An Anthology edited by Jing Wang

Old tales, untold : Lu Xun against world literature

World literature has smiled on Lu Xun 魯迅. He stands, if not as the foremost, then as a major representative of modern Chinese literature in anthologies. Though anthologies are not the ultimate arbiters of literary worldliness, they are influential discursive sites because of their accessibility and classroom utility. To wit, he is a common figure on university syllabi in world literature surveys. Professionally, scholarship on Lu Xun’s work reaches far beyond disciplinary Chinese studies. His works have been translated and retranslated many times in less than a century. All this is perhaps fitting considering his extraordinary services rendered to world literature as a reader and translator. Following David Damrosch’s (2003) provisional definition of world literature as circulation beyond a national origin (281), Lu Xun enabled dozens of works to circulate in Chinese, and in turn his works circulate beyond the Sinosphere. But not all of them. If, following Franco Moretti (2013), we were to look at world literature as a market, a work’s circulation has to do with the demands of readers as much as with its innate qualities (69-70). These demands reflect geopolitical realities, to be sure, but can also constitute an apologetics for them

Earth networks : 'The human surge' and cognitive mapping

This article explores the way in which the global can be imagined in the cinema by taking up the concept of cognitive mapping as proposed by Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson. It contends that the totalising remit of the concept offers an especially productive avenue through which to assess how the world has been mapped out in contemporary genres as disparate as the global network film and the world symphony. In particular, the article proposes that the film The Human Surge (2016), by the Argentinean Eduardo Williams, updates an aesthetics of cognitive mapping in revealing ways – one that is as attuned to the phenomenology of lived experience and the topology of an elusive world system, as it is to the earth as both the ground and planet we share with other human and nonhuman beings

Eastern cultural heritage, digital remediation and global perspectives

The paper describes findings from a practice-based research project exploring cross-cultural influences between the West and the East by recreating the concept of Shan-Shui-Hua – the traditional Eastern landscape painting within the new genre of “Video-Painting” as wall-mounted flat screen video installa-tion. It uses concepts of Art Appropriation, Remedia-tion and Remix to re-investigate relationships of man and nature in Eastern traditional landscape art and philosophy and transposes the content to contempo-rary global environmental issues and digital visualiza-tion technology. Using the “other” or the “unfamiliar” allows a fresh access and new interpretation of well-known territory. As such cultural heritage is seen as an opportunity to explore new artistic boundaries and styles of representation within set commodities of contemporary (digital) image creation. Translating and adapting subtle aesthetics, rich metaphor and philosophy of Eastern traditions creates a powerful, subversive tool to address pressing ecological issues differently and allows alternative ways of seeing and thinking thereby detecting Western preoccupations

'The Rich Harmonics of Past Time': Memory and Montage

This article examines John Sommerfield’s 1936 novel, May Day, a work that experiments with multiple perspectives, voices and modes. The article examines the formal experiments of the novel in order to bring into focus contemporary debates around the aesthetics of socialist realism, the politics of Popular Front anti-fascism and the relationship between writers on the left and the legacies of literary modernism. The article suggests that while leftist writers’ appropriations of modernist techniques have been noted by critics, there has been a tendency to assume that such approaches were in contravention of the aesthetics of socialist realism. Socialist realism is shown to be more a fluid and disputed concept than such readings suppose, and Sommerfield’s adaptations of modernist textual strategies are interpreted as key components of a political aesthetic directed towards the problems of alienation and social fragmentation