Abstract

Recent scholarship on the cultural history of the Cold War has shown how the US provided institutional and financial support for certain types of literature and fostered the growth of select groups of writers and translators worldwide, including in allied regions of Asia. This talk argues that what was fostered was not only specific authors and works, but also particular ways of thinking and arguing about literature. Intellectuals in Asia imported methodologies of literary criticism from the United States, most notably New Criticism and its hallmark practice of “close reading.” Today, “close reading” is the default analytical method for literary studies in English-speaking academia globally, a most basic research skill that every student majoring in literature must learn. Yet this approach was effectively unknown in Sinophone Asia until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when US-trained scholars introduced it to Chinese-language literary criticism. This talk highlights pivotal moments in 1970s Hong Kong and Taiwan when “close reading” was practiced for the first time in Chinese. It argues that the new method served as an instrumental tool in the ideologically charged debates over the aesthetic value of modern Chinese writing.

Speaker Biography

Ji Yueling is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Studies at NUS, and received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her current research project, Chinese Literary Style: Aesthetic Judgment in the Cold War Era, is a study of the history and methodology of Chinese literary criticism. By identifying the changing ways critics engaged with the elusive concept of style in the twentieth century, this study offers an account of the development-or modernization-of Chinese literary criticism. In doing so, it also highlights the political character of this development, with attention to Sino-Soviet intellectual relations and US cultural diplomacy in Asia during the Cold War.