Paola Iovene
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804789370
- eISBN:
- 9780804791601
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804789370.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The chapter discusses forgotten publications dealing with the technological futures of humanity, including popular science magazines, children’s literature, and science fiction and films from the ...
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The chapter discusses forgotten publications dealing with the technological futures of humanity, including popular science magazines, children’s literature, and science fiction and films from the 1950s through the1980s, showing that Chinese socialist culture participated in an imagination of the future shared across the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. Overcoming distinctions between mental and manual labor was central to the Maoist vision of a future society. Various science-related genres considered this issue, especially at moments of intensified utopian aspirations: the Great Leap Forward (late 1950s) and the beginning of the Reform Era (late 1970s and early 1980s). While narratives of the Great Leap Forward glorify physical labor, post-Mao science fiction subverts this hierarchy by associating manual labor with vulgarity, primitive stages of human evolution, and with defective female robots. The laboring body becomes the residue of a technological regime about to be overcome.Less
The chapter discusses forgotten publications dealing with the technological futures of humanity, including popular science magazines, children’s literature, and science fiction and films from the 1950s through the1980s, showing that Chinese socialist culture participated in an imagination of the future shared across the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. Overcoming distinctions between mental and manual labor was central to the Maoist vision of a future society. Various science-related genres considered this issue, especially at moments of intensified utopian aspirations: the Great Leap Forward (late 1950s) and the beginning of the Reform Era (late 1970s and early 1980s). While narratives of the Great Leap Forward glorify physical labor, post-Mao science fiction subverts this hierarchy by associating manual labor with vulgarity, primitive stages of human evolution, and with defective female robots. The laboring body becomes the residue of a technological regime about to be overcome.
Paola Iovene
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804789370
- eISBN:
- 9780804791601
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804789370.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Twentieth-century Chinese literature has been characterized by an obsession with the future, an obsession that is often commented on but rarely scrutinized. Most studies of Chinese literature ...
More
Twentieth-century Chinese literature has been characterized by an obsession with the future, an obsession that is often commented on but rarely scrutinized. Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation-building, and with the utopian visions propagated by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future thus understood has often been seen as a “destination” a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces the concept of “anticipation” as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Anticipation names the “future in the present,” the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds and that are often mediated by literary texts. Each of the book’s five chapters details how different modes of anticipation find expression in contemporary Chinese literature, with a focus on fictional genres. Each chapter explores how emotions such as hope and fear as well as ideas on “what may come next” find concrete expression in a variety of Chinese texts and institutional contexts, ranging from science fiction to translation journals and from modernist writing to environmental literature, with the aim of tracing overlooked continuities throughout the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, and thus refining our understanding of Chinese socialist and postsocialist literary modernity.Less
Twentieth-century Chinese literature has been characterized by an obsession with the future, an obsession that is often commented on but rarely scrutinized. Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation-building, and with the utopian visions propagated by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future thus understood has often been seen as a “destination” a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces the concept of “anticipation” as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Anticipation names the “future in the present,” the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds and that are often mediated by literary texts. Each of the book’s five chapters details how different modes of anticipation find expression in contemporary Chinese literature, with a focus on fictional genres. Each chapter explores how emotions such as hope and fear as well as ideas on “what may come next” find concrete expression in a variety of Chinese texts and institutional contexts, ranging from science fiction to translation journals and from modernist writing to environmental literature, with the aim of tracing overlooked continuities throughout the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, and thus refining our understanding of Chinese socialist and postsocialist literary modernity.
