This article focuses on the strategies that literature and cultural criticism adopt to represent trauma in comparison to a current medical definition. The contemporary medical definition, trauma as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is the most narrow and specific definition to discuss trauma. The discourse of medicine does not necessarily match those of literature and cultural criticism, nor need they conform to each other. PTSD includes a collection of symptoms, any one of which might not have anything to do with traumatic experience, but which together point with increasing intensity to a psychological syndrome caused by traumatic shock. Although this is historically a recently defined syndrome (1980), its features had long before attracted attention and been recorded under other terms and diagnoses. Although Chinese literature is only occasionally given to psychological realism, we do find occasional descriptions that strongly suggest aspects of the syndrome. Also, the aims and the needs of medicine and literature or cultural criticism are not necessarily the same, but it is important to explore in greater detail the aims and the needs of literature and cultural criticism.

Through analyzing Hegel’s influence via Taine on Meiji Japan and later, on the late Qing and early Republican China, this paper will shed lights on the process of the making of national history with literary history in modern Japan and its influences on modern China. It argues that the simultaneous establishment of modern Japanese historiography and the writing of literary history in Japan had a direct impact on the establishment of Chinese historiography in the late Qing, and the writing of Chinese literary history in twentieth-century China. It will focus more on the philosophical ideas of Taine and Hegel and their influence in Japanese literary historiography and, due to the limited length of this paper, only by extension, that of China as well. The primary focus of this paper is the interaction of the modern Japanese and Chinese pursuit of new historical narratives in the construction of new national and cultural identities in the context of global modernity. It also stresses that, an invisible “origin,” the writing of Chinese (literary) history in the early twentieth-century, ironically, directly and indirectly, has been internalized by the writing of Japanese national history in an exclusive framework of nation-building.

This essay explores different seventeenth-century accounts of the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644—Chinese vernacular novels and literati memoirs, Jesuit histories, and Dutch poetry and plays—to investigate a developing notion of openness in both Europe and China. In Europe, the idea of openness helped to construct an early-modern global order based on the free flow of material goods, religious beliefs, and shared information. In these accounts, China’s supposed refusal to open itself to the world came to represent Europe’s Other, an obstacle to the liberal global order. In doing so, however, European accounts drew on Chinese popular sources that similarly embraced openness, albeit openness of a different kind, that is the direct and unobstructed communication between ruler and subject. This is not to say that Chinese late-Ming accounts of the fall of the Ming are the source of European ideals of liberalism, but rather to suggest that, at a crucial early-modern moment of globalization, European authors misapprehended late-Ming ideals of enlightened imperial rule so as to consolidate their own worldview, foreclosing late-Ming ideals in the process.

Commonly acclaimed for its black humor, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out uses the Buddhist concept of reincarnation to follow two families during the second half of the 20th century. The novel exemplifies the strategies through which Mo Yan transforms the violent and absurd events of recent Chinese history into personal memory of historical trauma. It focuses less, however, on those events per se than on the traumatic effects they create on the individual victims, and on the ways through which personal trauma caused by historical atrocities is addressed and healed. This article analyzes three layers of the novel: the evolving mechanisms of violence that condition the formation of personal trauma; the theatrical manifestation of the state-endorsed violence, and its loss in the post-revolutionary era; and the rationalization of the tragicomic past through the dialectic of remembering and forgetting. Built one on the other, these layers constitute the very dynamic stage on which the individuals interact with the violent and absurd world to negotiate the meaning of their lives, make sense of historical trauma, and insist on driving historical change.

For a long period Ye Shengtao’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” has been read as a simple fairytale along with his other fairytale writings. Its politico-philosophical implications thus is blurred by students’ focus on the “historical context” of the 1930s of China, when Ye Shengtao’s fairytales were composed. This essay argues that Ye Shengtao’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” could be dealt with as a politico-philosophical text, despite or because of the historical context of China at that time which does not provide a political reality corresponding to what is called “sovereignty” in its classical sense in the field of political science. By interpreting Ye Shengtao’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” from a perspective of conceptual analysis by reading it together with other two stories about the same topic written by Hans Andersen and Juan Manuel, this essay also attempts to read the story against the grain of the history of modern Chinese literature, taking it as an allegory of sovereignty and its fragility, staging it theoretically with philosophical thoughts on sovereignty in the works of, for example, Hobbes, Spinoza, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. While Manuel’s story first puts forth the problematic of sovereignty, Andersen’s version pushes to the extreme the logic of self-legitimation carried out by the narrative of sovereignty. Ye Shengtao’s rewriting, in this textual context, deconstructs this logic and points out a possibility of the politics of democracy.

General Yue Fei has long been considered a symbol of loyalty and resistance in Chinese history. His legend has been circulating in various forms since the twelfth century. In the context of the emerging women-authored tanci narratives and the political disorder of late 19th century China, this article examines how the gentry woman author Zhou Yingfang 周颖芳 (1829-95) enriches the narratives of Yue Fei by inserting a number of domestic themes into her tanci adaptation. She redefines the virtues of both genders and expects transformed family dynamics. In considering scholarly interpretations of the tanci in the modern period, this article also argues that the May Fourth scholars tended to neglect and/or suppress Zhou Yingfang’s gendered consciousness in her alternative imagination of history.

The cosmopolitan cultural behaviors employed by war films and teleplays in the reconstruction of national traumatic memories are worthy of understanding and respect. However, in present-day China, the quantity of Anti-Japanese War films and teleplays is abnormally high, and their values deeply enmeshed in a radical nationalism. The result is a general trend towards a “carnival of vengeful images.” Given the potential harms implicit in this situation, the question of just what kind of war narratives are appropriate for the contemporary circumstances of globalization should receive serious attention and reconsideration from society at large.

This essay employs the approach of New Criticism close reading to interpret My Jerusalem by a contemporary Chinese poet, Wang Guilin, from the dialogic perspective of “I and Thou.” From a dimension of faith beyond daily life, the poet narrates his astonishment, historical reflection and spiritual transformation during a visit to Jerusalem. For him, the journey to Jerusalem was also a pilgrimage to a spiritual homeland, self-achievement, and peace and love.