| New textual forms, the magazine and the canon anthology, reveal new ways of considering the spectacle of revolution, modernity and nation-building in China. The concept of the paratext is applied in the analysis of the early modern Chinese periodical and the first modern literary canon anthology. The paratext of a book consists of textual “thresholds” (including the title and table of contents, prefaces, other commentary, as well as publishing details) that provide entry to the main text and determine reader reception. From the late-Qing through the May Fourth era, the paratext of the Chinese magazine operated to make the main texts more open to time and audience. In the magazine, periodic production, beginning texts like the manifesto and fakanci, miscellaneous or “za” editorial organization, the zagan or suiganlu essay, and readers' contributions, all point to a new porous dynamic between text, audience and time that defined the Chinese periodical's modernity and constituted a new literary technology.; In contrast, when we turn to the Zhongguo Xinwenxue Daxi (Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature), the ordering practices of collection, the ten daoyan prefaces, and the marketing of the series, comprise a different kind of print language, one which deconstructed the open texts of the magazines and applied traditional museumifying practices to the recent past in order to assign a new beginning to history.; An architectural model is developed to analyze both kinds of texts as social space, as structural homologies are explored between the magazine and the department store, and between the canon and museum. Both text and architecture comprise narrative strategies, chronotopes which structure time and space in new ways, changing the nature of reading and writing, and of production and consumption in China. The magazine and the department store manufacture the immediacies of the latest time, while the canon and museum push the present back into a premature past, static and utopian. At their heart lies the deep tension between belief and chance, between ideology and the exigencies of real time. This conflict continues in China, and can be seen in the various reconstructions of the paratext since 1949 to the present. |
