The Bildungsroman of an Absolute Socialist Artist: Fu Lei’s Family letters 1954-1966
Associate Professor Yi Zheng (University of New South Wales, Sydney) is LIAS Fellow in the School of History and Heritage and the Centre for Culture and Creativity will be delivering a seminar on 17th June in ATB 3112 between 2-3pm. Lunch will be served at 1:30.
She is working with Dr Leon Rocha and Professor Stephi Hemelryk Donald on the development of Chinese Studies at Lincoln and is pursuing a joint project on ‘socialist feeling’. The symposium contributes to the development of that project.
Prof Zheng’s publications include:
(2018), 從危機詩學到地域小說：中國現代文學論文集 (From Crisis Poetics to Place Fiction: Collected Essays on Modern Chinese Literature）, 1, 花木蘭文化事業有限公司, 台灣新北市, http://elib.infolinker.com.tw/cgi-bin2/Libo.cgi?
(2013), Contemporary Chinese print media: Cultivating middle-class taste, http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315889856
(2011), From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature, 1, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781557535764
The Bildungsroman of an Absolute Socialist Artist: Fu Lei’s Family letters 1954-1966
Bildungsroman became a modern Chinese genre in the early twentieth century. It introduced a temporal-linear and developmental narrative, delineating rites of becoming of individual characters through processes of interiority.[1] The genre is enlisted as an ideal literary form for the transformation of the Socialist New Man in the newly established People’s Republic of China (1949-). The metamorphosis of the socialist bildungsroman, however, augments both the inherent promises and difficulties of the genre. Beyond contesting visions of bildung, its long-form narrative of protracted internal reckoning becomes an increasingly wearisome process for the end point of socialist formation. A complete socialist bildungsroman proves difficult to attain. Exploring Fu Lei’s Family Letters 1954-1966 as an accidental but unadulterated, then aborted socialist bildungsroman highlights the case in point. Fu (1908-1966), an aesthete and the translator of Jean-Christophe(Romain Rolland 1904‒1912), sketched an ideal blueprint for the formation of a Romantic Socialist artist in over two hundred family letters when new aesthetic and literary regimes were instituted for the People’s Republic. Fu’s private epistolary transformation of the kunstlerroman became a under-current of Chinese socialist literature. It sheds light on the generic development and constraints of the Socialist Bildungsroman as a narrative and historical aesthetic form, highlighting the double bind of Chinese Socialist literature as an institution.
Story submitted by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
StDonald@lincoln.ac.uk