The Catastrophe Remembered by the Non-Traumatic: Counternarratives on the Cultural Revolution in Chinese Literature of the 1990s
Year: 2009
Type: dissertation
Abstract: After its demise in 1976, the Cultural Revolution has been conventionally \nportrayed as an era of political persecution, a “cultural desert,” an ascetic regime, \nand a decade of total chaos. Contested memories of this period, however, \nappeared in literary writings of the 1990s: memories that placed in the foreground \nself-motivated learning, sexual indulgence, juvenile adventure and mundane \nliving. Remembering the Cultural Revolution from the perspectives of the nontraumatic, \nthese narratives allowed certain social groups and individuals to forge \nnew identities beyond that of the political victim. \nMy dissertation studies these alternative narratives that “detraumatize” the \nCultural Revolution, paying special attention to the actions and relations of \nliterary producers who played a significant role in defining the discursive \nfunctions of these works. I argue that, while sharing a common gesture of \nredeeming personal histories from a collective past, these narratives were used in \nvarious ways to serve the needs of the present. In different cases, the construction \nof an “alternative reality” of the Cultural Revolution could serve as a coping \nstrategy that fulfills personal or psychological needs, as a means to legitimize new \nintellectual trends, as a way to boost an emerging cultural fashion, or as a weapon \nwith which cultural agents contend for positions in a drastically restructured \ncultural field.
Author: Yue Ma
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: University of Texas at Austin
OpenAlex ID: W1898394732