Professor David der-wei Wang's opening Humanitas lecture, 'From Mara Poet to Nobel Laureate: On Modern Chinese Literary Culture', delivered as part of his Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Chinese Studies at the University of Cambridge, May 2014.

This talk examines modern Chinese literature not as a corpus of texts but as a constellation of tastes, discourses, occasions, and productions contested by historical dynamics. The talk starts with the year 1908, when Lu Xun introduced "Mara Poet" as a modern agent to "pluck" one's heart and thereby transform China. This Mara Poet underwent multiple incarnations in the subsequent decades, from a romantic iconoclast to a modernist rebel and a revolutionary fighter, finally becoming a Maoist Cadre. Meanwhile, since the 1920s, modern Chinese literary culture has been occupied by another figure, Alfred Nobel, as the country was striving to catch up with world literature. When Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan were awarded the Nobel Prizes in the new millennium, however, that produced more questions than answers as to the meaning and function of Chinese literature.

From Mara to Nobel by way of Mao, modern Chinese literary culture has been conceived, produced, circulated, and consumed in a multitude of ways. The talk will focus on the following topics: the changing fields of production, the fashioning of literary subjectivity, and the negotiation of literary values, during the pre-May Fourth era, the eve of 1949, and the postsocialist era.


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Humanitas is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge designed to bring leading academics, practitioners and scholars to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and co-ordinated in Cambridge by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and in Oxford by the Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH).

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