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Chinese Literature Podcast

Lee Moore talks about Chinese Literature.
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Chinese Literature Podcast
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Now displaying: 2018
Dec 18, 2018

Today, Nick Stember, the expert on Chinese Manhua (similar to Japanese Manga), joins us as we discuss a short manhua cartoon booklet that was published in 1950. The booklet was meant to be a simple way to explain the 1950 Marriage Law, one of the first acts passed by the new Communist government. The Law legitimized the Communists in the eyes of many Chinese women and their progressive allies. It was the first Chinese to legalize a woman's right to divorce (divorce had been permitted before, but under circumstances generally unfavorable to women), and it modernized many of the old customs in rural China. This was the first in a series of feminist policies the Communists implemented, and the text we explore today provides an interesting angle through which to explore gender, propaganda and ideology in 1950's China. 

Nov 25, 2018
 Today's podcast is a solo podcast where Lee interviews China journalist and author, Robert Delaney. Delaney has just published a novel which is semi-autobiographical, in which a film-maker disappears into the maw of the Chinese police.
Jul 16, 2018

Today, we get to interview a flesh-and-blood maker of Chinese literature who has recently put out a series of short stories on a fictionalized version of real Chinese families. We talked to her to find out how she went about her craft and what motivated her to write the stories she did.

Jun 23, 2018

We go back to Zhang Ailing, the author Lee claims to be the best Chinese writer of the 20th Century. Rob and Lee discuss her most anthologized work in English, Sealed Off. It is a psychological story occurring inside the heads of a handful of people stuck on a tram in Shanghai under the control of the Japanese. Zhang Ailing is responding to Shi Zhecun's One Night in the Rainy Season, but her work universalizes this psychologicalized narrator; now, women can be narrators, something seemingly impossible in Shi Zhecun's work. The question that hangs over the story is what is sealed off from what? We drift in between the minds of men and women on the tram; we are not sealed off from the most intimate parts of their heads. So what are we sealed off from?

Jun 11, 2018

No one expected it, least of all us, but this is our 50th episode with the podcast. Today, Rob and Lee are going to celebrate just like the ancients used to....with a Top 5 Countdown! The pair will share what the top five works of Chinese literature they will still be reading in fifty years. 

May 21, 2018

In this episode, we return to the Root-seeking authors (xungen), this time with Han Shaogong and his enigmatic story Bababa. The story, if you can call it that, has a disjointed plot. It is focused on a village, and maybe the main character is a boy who can only say two things, Papa (baba) and F#$* Mama. Does this boy serve as a good leader for the village? Does he destroy the village? Every time he utters one of his two phrases, villagers try to divine what he means and what it means for the fate of the village. The story questions whether or not language means anything, whether we can say stories even mean anything

Apr 17, 2018

This story, The Great Maudgalyayana Rescues his Mom from Hell, is one of the earliest in Chinese vernacular fiction. The version we are reading was found in Dunhuang by Aurel Stein, the Hungarian Britisher who discovered the world's oldest known book. Today's story looks at Maudgalyayana, the Indian Buddhist who travels into the depths of hell to rescue his misbehaving mother and is one of the most successful advertisements for Buddhism in China.

Feb 2, 2018

Welcome to Cat Country! 

In 1932, Lao She, the famous Chinese writer, penned a book about a Chinese astronaut crashing into Mars and finding the planet populated with Cat People. These Cat People are a way for Lao She to satirize the Chinese. Let the craziness begin!

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