Xie analyzes three novels by the international award-winning Chinese writer Yan Lianke and investigates how his signature “mythorealist” form produces textual meanings that subvert the totalizing reality prescribed by literary realism.
The term mythorealism, which Yan coined to describe his own writing style, refers to a set of literary devices that incorporate both Chinese and Western literary elements while remaining primarily grounded in Chinese folk culture and literary tradition. In his use of mythorealism, carrying a burden of social critique that cannot allow itself to become “political,” Yan transcends the temporality and provinciality of immediate social events and transforms his potential socio-political commentaries into more diversified concerns for humanity, existential issues, and spiritual crisis. Xie identifies three modes of mythorealist narrative exemplified in Yan’s three novels: the minjian (folk) mode in Dream of Ding Village, the allusive mode in Ballad, Hymn, Ode, and the enigmatic mode in The Four Books. By positioning itself against an ambiguous articulation of social determinants of historical events that would perhaps be more straightforward in a purely realist text, each mode of mythorealism moves its narrative from the overt politicality of the subject matter to the existential riddle of negotiating an alternative reality.
A groundbreaking study of one of contemporary China’s most important authors that will be of great value to scholars and students of Chinese literature.
Author(s): Haiyan Xie
Series: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Approaches to Chinese Literature
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 157
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction: Contemporariness and Contemporary Chinese Literature
Yan Lianke and Chinese Fiction in the 1980s and 1990s
Minjian Writing and Contemporary Chinese Writers
The Alternative Contemporariness of Yan Lianke
Selection of Texts and Summary of Chapters
Notes
Bibliography
1. Mythorealism as Method
The Unfilial Son of Realism
The Paradox of Mythorealism
Mythorealist Causality and Realities in the Western Perspective
Ideology, Form, and the Representation of Reality in Mythorealism
Notes
Bibliography
2. AIDS and the Haunted Minjian: Negotiating the National Character in Dream of Ding Village
Introduction
The Fever as an Allegory of the National Character
The Bystanders and the Ghost’s Gaze
Haunting Dreams and the Tainted Moral Defender
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
3. Disenchanted Shijing and Spiritual Crisis: Allusive Sex and Illusive Disgust in Ballad
Introduction
Ballad, Hymn, Ode, and Its Mytorealist Components
The Desymbolized World and the Disenchanted Intellectuals
The Indeterminacy of Sex and the Schizophrenic
The Disgusting and the Dystopian Imagination of Spiritual Home
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
4. Docile Body and Ethical Self: The Religious, the Grotesque, and the Mythological in The Four Books
Introduction
The Re-Ed District: An Absurdist Foucauldian Panopticon
Rediscovering Haizi: A Religious Care for Self and Others
Crazy Wheat and Cannibalism: Renegotiating Self through the Grotesque
The Eastern Sisyphus: A Mythological Reconciliation between the Political and the Ethical
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
