Postsocialist Collectivities: Institutions, Aesthetics, Politics in the Sinophone Novel
Open Access
- Author:
- Tsen, Darwin Han-Lin
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 10, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Eric Robert Hayot, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Shuang Shen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Kathryn Alexia Merkel-Hess Mcdonald, Committee Member
Jonathan Eran Abel, Committee Member
Tina Chen Goudie, Outside Member - Keywords:
- China
Postsocialism
Postcolonialism
Sinophone
novel
Taiwan
Malaysia
institutions
anarchism
critical theory
collective
Ｍarxism
Occupy
modern literature - Abstract:
- My dissertation, “Postsocialist Collectivities: Institutions, Aesthetics, Politics in the Sinophone Novel” examines the concept of collectivity in the modern fiction of China, Taiwan, and Chinese Malaysia. The dissertation shows how the history of economic postsocialism, institutional change, and literary form interact to produce a complex sense of “collectivity” for authors in the Chinese diaspora. It links the changes in fictional collectivity to the outgoing tide of socialist practices in the People's Republic of China after the Cultural Revolution. In its respective chapters, “Postsocialist Collectivities” offers close readings of novels by Mo Yan (China), Luo Yijun (Taiwan), and Li Zishu (Malaysia), written between 1976 to 2010, a period in which capitalism consolidated its power over formerly socialist places. Drawing on sociology, political theory, poststructuralism, queer theory, postsocialist literary and cultural criticism, I argue that the imagination of collectivity in the Sinophone novel expands the conceptual valences of postsocialism to include the temporally uneven experience of socialism stretched across geographies. By joining postsocialism with the Sinophone, my project provides a temporal-spatial approach to literary and political cultures that contributes to the fields of Asian Studies, postcolonialism and diasporic studies.