The emotive self in change and exchange: Early 20th century Chinese writers' response to classical Chinese aesthetics

My dissertation explores modern Chinese writers' reassessment of the classical Chinese aesthetic principle of jingjie and their reconstruction of emotions in a colonial and post-colonial context. I suggest that jingjie constructs affective modes that either convey a Zhuangzian sense of "being one with all things" through the perspective of "no self," or else constructs qing (the emotions) as lamentation over loss or absence. In either state, subjectivity creates its own "endlessness" and a sense of infinite self by reflecting upon the cosmic condition that makes desire and emotion an unresolvable pair. Jingjie appeals to modern writers precisely because its emotive forms are presented as infinite and identical with forces of "the real," and are, in their traditional contexts, supposed to transcend any empirical desire created by concrete objects or objectives. I suggest that jingjie becomes a problematic issue when modern writers who have been nurtured on that concept are confronted by the post-enlightenment discourse of rationality and science, by Western romantic and post romantic ideas, and by the historical-political situation that confronted China in the early 20th century. Modern writers resurrected jingjie in order to lend form to a new sense of infinite self and to generate agency for change that could both engage a new historical context and stand in resistance to material desire.; By investigating the ways in which Wang Guowei, Lu Xun, Zhang Ailing, and Li Jinfa construct self and agency through forms of infinite emotions, I foreground the complexity of the relationship between these infinite emotions and object desires. I suggest that these writers explore possibilities of infinite emotions by engaging Western philosophy, literature, and art through the lens of jingjie, and this engagement is necessarily reframed in a historical context woven by colonial and post-colonial relations. Bringing the inquiry of desire and emotions to bear upon post-colonial studies, my project seeks to draw attention to the deep problematic of aesthetic emotions structuring modern Chinese literature, and thereby to not only engage but revise the theories of self, agency, and resistance that currently underlie cultural, cross-cultural, and post-colonial studies.