Woman and representation: Feminist readings of modern Chinese fiction (1917-1937)

My dissertation is a feminist project in modern Chinese literature (1919-1937) which aims at clarifying and articulating the ideological ramifications of gender, literary criticism, and cultural history. By focusing in each chapter on issues in representation, my dissertation proposes a feminist revision of existing modernist paradigms.;My first chapter examines the two major heuristic models that are operative in the study of modern Chinese literature, i.e. the "East" versus "West" and the "traditional" versus "modern" binary oppositions. Reading the May Fourth discourse on modernism as a construction of literary history that at once feminizes mass culture and excludes the cultural participation of women, this chapter argues that modernist paradigms affirm an elitist notion of culture and a trajectory of "othering" in the service of a hegemonic male subjectivity.;In Chapter Two, I examine the use of realism in May Fourth fiction through which Chinese intellectuals hoped to redefine literature and the role of writers. While the representations of the female subaltern, i.e. the lower-class, uneducated woman, must be taken as a sincere gesture on part of May Fourth writers to create a socially responsible and effective literature, these "realist" writings merely reinforce traditional assumptions about female experiences and a male intellectual power-position.;In Chapter Three, I examine the May Fourth "romantic" writings which occupy a controversial position in literary history. A key notion here is the "feminine" that operates as a literary mode of expressing the private emotional world. What we observe here is the feminization of male subjectivity that reinforces an epistemological trajectory of "invested suffering" and the image of China as a weak nation.;My last chapter takes a closer look at modern Chinese women writers and their problem of articulating the specificity of the double-edged experience as women and writers. In most writings, revolution is seen as complicit with patriarchal conceptions of women which severely skirt their ambitions to progressive thinking. What the writings of Chinese women tell us then, is that writing and history are irreducibly gender-specific and implicitly inform aesthetic standards of literature against our better judgement.