Lu Xun again? Really? Yes, really. But we still disagree. For Rob, the 1920's were Lu Xun's definitive decade. For Lee, it was the era of Ding Ling, who fired the opening salvo in what would become a century of powerful, innovative female writers.
Who was the most important Chinese writer of the 1910-1919 period? Was it Li Dazhao, and his experiments with prose poetry and Marxist theory? Or was it Lu Xun, with his adaptation of Russian realism to a Chinese context? And who, most importantly, had the best moustache?
Have you ever wanted to learn more about China, but were either unsure where to start, or didn't have the money or access? Our new supplement is designed to help. Join us as we discuss our personal picks for essential works on China. Wowkrs that are challenging, but not opaque, interesting, but not amusing. It's everything you need.
Here it is: part one in our new series! We're discussing the definitive writers of each decade in China's 20th century. Along the way, you'll get a mini tour of modern Chinese history, and see how literature played a part in its development.
This week? See how Wang Guowei and Wu Jianren were the writers who defined the last imperial decade in Chinese history.
We said we'd post something on the 24th, didn't we? And here it is. Just a friendly chat about some of the things that have changed for the podcast, and for us as podcasters and scholars.
Today, we have a guest, Antonio Leggieri on the podcast to talk about his phd research on the late imperial novel Guzhang Juechen.
The 三字經, usually translated as the Three Character Classic, is a fascinating text because it functions like a "my first Confucian text." Children were given this text when they were quite young and asked to memorize the book, teaching them moral lessons that would prepare them to master the real Confucian classics later in life. In this episode, Rob and Lee debate the first few lines of the poem.
Just a note: we recorded this in 2018, and then we added a prologue to the front end of the podcast.
Today, Rob is off doing research in China, so Lee interviews Professor Van Norden. Professor Van Norden is a philosophy professor at Vassar, and he works on early Chinese philosophical texts.
He recently published a textbook for learning Classical Chinese (文言文). The book is the outgrowth of Professor Van Norden's teaching, and he seeks to make Classical Chinese more approachable than do other textbooks on the language. Professor Van Norden and Lee discuss his book and wider issues related to early Chinese texts.
Yu Dafu is an early 20th Century writer known for one work: Sinking. This novella is highly autobiographical, and it discusses the trials and tribulations of a Chinese student living in Japan. His attitude towards Japanese women and the Chinese nation is both fascinating and disturbing, and Rob and Lee dive into those attitudes. This is the last of our series on Toxic Masculinity in Chinese Literature.
The Fourth in our series on Toxic Masculinity, this is the story of a man whose wife is sleeping around, a man who is not doing a good job of taking care of his father, a man who, at least in a pre-modern Chinese context, is not a man at all. Upon learning that his wife has tricked him, Ren mans up, going on a murderous rampage, killing his wife, her lover, her parents and her maid, and thus restoring his masculinity. Does this story endorse this violent act? Or is it being ironic? That and more in another Moore debate on this episode of the Chinese Literature Podcast.
The Water Margin, or the 水浒传 (shui hu zhuan) is one of the novels from the Ming Dynasty that we can point to as the origin of much of the Kung Fu tradition. It is the story of 108 dudes (I'm being technical here). They live outside of the boundaries of the urban Chinese world, just on the edge of civilization. The government is corrupt, so they have formed their own gang. They live by a code, brotherhood and revenge, and they kill anyone who gets in their way, including each other. This is the second in our series on toxic masculinity.