Through a comparative analysis of diverse texts and contexts, this
book offers a cultural history of the interplay between the
aesthetic and the political in the formation of personal and
collective identity that crystallizes into the Chinese aesthetic of
the sublime.
It describes how various kinds of politics are aestheticized and
how aesthetic manifestations are bound up with prevalent ideologies
and politics. In this book, politics refers to various projects for
fashioning a viable self, a workable personal and collective
identity in the crisis-ridden history of modern China. These
projects include imagining a political subject adapted to the
modern nation-state, mobilizing revolutionary masses as subjects of
the Communist state, sustaining a unified self despite the
challenges to traditional culture, erecting the sublime figure of
the revolutionary hero, and, finally, debunking the grand images of
the hero and history in post-Mao culture. Throughout, the author
seeks to delineate the ways the political masquerades as aesthetic
discourse and aesthetic experience.
Covering a wide range of material from fiction, poetry, aesthetics,
and political discourse to memoirs, film, and historical documents,
the book reconsiders a number of prominent cultural figures,
including Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Mao
Zedong, Zhu Guangqian, and Li Zehou. It also analyzes such
important cultural features and events as Western influences on the
formation of modern Chinese aesthetic discourse, modernist
writings, Revolutionary Cinema, the Cultural Revolution, and New
Wave Fiction.
An East-West comparative approach informs the analysis, which
engages in dialogue with Kant, Hegel, Freud, Marx, and Walter
Benjamin, as well as Terry Eagleton and other contemporary critics.
The author's interdisciplinary method, which emphasizes the
interaction among text, context, and the psyche, both presents new
materials and illuminates familiar texts and phenomena from the
perspective of the political-aesthetic nexus.
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