“Mending the Sky” or “Forging a New Sun”?—Myth Rewriting and the May Fourth Predicament of “Disenchantment” in “Rebirth of the Goddesses”
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Guo Moruo’s “Rebirth of the Goddesses” is among the landmark works of modern Chinese poetry. Its myth-rewriting amounts to an act of “disenchantment” carried out amid the ruins of “enchantment”. Yet this heroic undertaking is caught in a triple dialectical vortex: in order to disenchant, it must appeal to the primordial “energies” of myth (nature, life, imagination); in order for disenchantment to be effective, it strategically “uses enchantment” (by requisitioning textual canons and ritual authority); and in the end—because of the intensity of rewriting and the depth of political and spiritual investment—it becomes itself a new layer of enchantment (a cycle of re-enchantment). This exposes the core dilemma of China’s modernity project: to build a new order on the ruins of tradition is necessarily a tragic enterprise of rupture and continuity, of disenchantment and re-enchantment at once.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel16121514
Authors: Shun Yao, Qinghong Yin
Institution: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Language: English
Subfield: General Arts and Humanities
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,172
OpenAlex ID: W4416860229