Chinese modernism: Autonomy, hybridity, gender, subalternity. Readings of Liu Na'ou, Mu Shiying, Shi Zhecun, Ye Lingfeng and Du Heng.

摘要

This thesis is an inter-textual study of five Chinese authors from the 1920s and 30s: Liu Na'ou, Mu Shiying, Shi Zhecun, Ye Lingfeng, and Du Heng. The thesis is divided into seven chapters. The introduction discusses critiques of the authors and the problematic of influence. These authors are often grouped under the name Xin ganjuepai (The New Sensation School) after a group of Japanese avant-garde writers. My research shows there was no such school in China; rather, it was simply a convenient title proposed by certain critics and researchers to link these writers to historically contiguous cultural production in other countries. With this in mind, the texts of these authors are considered as manifestations of avant-garde and modernist cultural production. In consideration of critical discourse in China that considers the literary production of these authors as an example of Shanghai culture (haipai), the name "Shanghai modernists" is used throughout this thesis.; The first chapter shows the importance of the concept of aesthetic autonomy for these writers through a reading of the "third type of person" debate that took place in Shanghai at the beginning of the 1930s. The second chapter is a critique of texts by the Shanghai modernists concerning the countryside in China. Accordingly, the concept of aesthetic autonomy is inscribed within the context of modernization and urbanization in republican China.; The third chapter analyses the concepts of national allegory and montage. Montage represents a fundamental concept in modern cultural production which presupposes a view of history as a traumatic event. The fourth chapter is a reading of a concept of literary montage as a form of cultural hybridity which is evidenced in the use of irony and self-referential double plot in stories by the Shanghai modernists. The fifth chapter reads stories by the Shanghai modernists as examples of discourses on gender and women in Republican China.; The conclusion is a discussion of irony as a trope of political affiliation that situates the Shanghai modernists as intellectual subalterns of the state.