1. The concept of the subject ( zhuti ) is not an indigenous Chinese concept. Inasmuch as it is deeply implicated in the concept of modernity, it was imported from the West when Chinese intellectuals started exploring the issue of modernity and modernization. I do not intend to trace the discursive origin of zhuti in modern and contemporary China in this essay. Nonetheless, a working definition of subjectivity may be in order here, even though most readers probably have an intuitive understanding of the term. In the Western philosophical tradition, what we understand today as "the subject" is the Cartesian Subject conceived as a specific and autonomous reality. This entity is "granted an exorbitant privilege in that there is in the end no Being nor being except in relation to him, for him and through him." See Michel Henry, "The Critique of the Subject,'' in Who Comes after the Subject? , ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 157. The essential predicates of the Cartesian Subject—"identity to self, positionality, property, personality, ego, consciousness, will, intentionality, freedom, humanity, etc."—are all ''ordered around being present ( étant-present ), presence to self." See Jacques Derrida, "'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida," in Who Comes after the Subject? , 109. According to David Kolb, modern subjectivity exists "as a subject when it imposes order. To impose a self-originated order on other things is an act of will. Modern subjectivity's self-affirmation expresses its power to control the conditions of representation." See Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 141. As a result, the postmodern crisis and critique of the subject is at the same time the crisis and critique of representation. Hegel defines the philosophical subject as "that which is capable of maintaining within itself its own contradiction." The subject always succeeds in reappropriating to itself the exteriority of its own predicate. In other words, the contradiction would be ''its own . . . that alienation or extraneousness would be ownmost, and that subjectivity . . . consists in reappropriating this proper being-outside-of-itself." See Nancy, introduction to Who Comes after the Subject? , 6.

2. I am referring specifically to the special issue of Discours social/Social Discourse on the "Non-Cartesian Subject," volume 6, nos. 1-2 (1994), in which an abridged version of this chapter was published. The editors Darko Suvin and Kojin Karatani were interested in the implicit "dialogue between 'non-Cartesian' cultures such as China and Japan with the 'First World.'" In their "Call for Papers," they phrased the problem of the non-Cartesian Subject as ''What forms of Subject are possible outside the individualist (Tocqueville) Self, and how does such a single but externalized and interacting Subject relate to various existing or potential collective Subjects?" (emphasis mine). Western intellectuals' revolt against the Cartesian subject took various forms. Starting from the poststructuralist "decentered subject," they initiated one debate after another on the status of the subject, debates that covered many disciplines: Lacan on psychoanalysis, Derrida on philosophy, Althusser on politics, and not in the least, literary criticism. To reverse the conceptual drive underlying the Cartesian Subject, many poststructuralist theorists denied the subject any possibilities of human agency. The proposition about the demise of the subject gave rise to counterarguments such as those by Paul Smith, who theorized about the return of the subject to its role as an active historical agent. See Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). The special issue of Discours social represents one such attempt to reinvigorate the Western tradition of the subject by inquiring into other forms of the subject in non-Western cultural traditions.

3. Wang Ruoshui, "Wei rendao zhuyi bianhu," 233.

4. Bei Dao, the cover of Jintian (Today), 3/4 (1991).

5. David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity , 154. Kolb compares the logic of our age with the metaphysical tradition of the past in which one can speak of some higher being or principle of reason that both guaranteed and supported the availability of other beings. Our age witnesses the disappearance of such higher beings. Nothing is there to command the availability of things. "In the world of total availability no one being grounds all the rest." They are just "in plain view." "The meaning of reality is pure available presence."

6. Nan Fan and Huang Ziping, "Xiaoshuo, shenmei qinggan yu shidai" (Narrative fiction, aesthetic sentiments, and [our] time), Beijing wenxue (Beijing literature) 11 (1988), 71-74. In this dialogue with Nan Fan, Huang Ziping problematizes the total and naive acceptance of pluralism by Chinese writers and critics. According to him, "the term 'pluralism' has been turned into the most efficacious charm that covered up our laziness and cowardice—whenever we come across a cultural phenomenon that is difficult to adumbrate, we simply put the matter in a nutshell by saying, 'This is pluralism'" (72). Here Huang Ziping is aware of the omnipresence of pluralism as another form of hegemony.

7. Tang Xiaobing, "The Function of New Theory: What Does It Mean to Talk about Post-Modernism in China?" Public Culture 4, no. 1 (1991), 89-108. Tang applauds the arrival of postmodernism in China as an aesthetic intervention in politics and social life. The postmodernist "obsession with intertextuality and the floating signifier leads to a happy rediscovery of the deconstructive force of the Chinese language" (106). But is the authoritarian Mao Style the only thing deconstructed by a "Chinese postmodernism?'' To that list, one might add the cultural subjecthood of China, or in Gates' terms, the core identity of the colonized. Perhaps the "deconstructive force" of postmodernism is not so innocent politically as Tang assumes.

8. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Critical Fanonism," Critical Inquiry 17, no. 3 (1991), 459. Gates points out the problematic nature of the natives' advocacy for pluralism in the postcolonial age. He sees in the invasion by Western pluralistic cultural logic the beginning of the dissolution of the individuality of the colonized. "The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity."

9. With the exception of Can Xue, all the experimentalists are male writers.

10. Liu Zaifu's "Lun wenxue de zhutixing" was originally published in Wenxue pinglun (Literary review) 6 (1985) and 1 (1986). "Wenxue yanjiu yingyi ren wei siwei zhongxin" was originally published in Wenhui bao , 8 July 1985. Xingge zuhe lun was originally published in Shanghai by Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1986.

11. Critiques of Liu Zaifu usually bypass the implications of Marxist humanism and socialist alienation in his work. Only a few critics such as He Xilai and Song Yaoliang mention in passing the relationship between Liu Zaifu's formulation of subjectivity with the problematic of Marxist humanism. He Xilai's statement drives home the gist of the matter most explicitly: we "cannot simply draw an equation between Liu's 'subjectivity of literature' and Hu Feng's 'subjective fighting spirit. . . . The presentation of the problematic of 'subjectivity of literature' . . . is a philosophical reformulation of [Marxist] humanism in the realm of literature." See He Xilai, "Guanyu wenxue zhutixing wenti de tantao" (The inquiry of the questions regarding subjectivity), Renmin ribao , 11 August 1986, overseas edition. Also see Song Yaoliang, Shinian wenxue zhuchao (The main literary currents of the decade) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1988), 273. And see Liu Kang, "Subjectivity, Marxism, and Culture Theory in China," Social Text 31/32, 114-40. Although Liu Kang promises to trace Liu Zaifu's "appropriations of Marxist categories in reconstituting subjectivity in Chinese culture," he bypasses the theoretical category of Marxian humanism but dwells at great length on the Hu Feng connection ("subjective fighting spirit''). The relevance of the debate over socialist alienation to Liu Zaifu's theory seems to have totally escaped his attention.

12. One should also be reminded that although most indigenous Chinese critics characterize the literary history of the 1980s in terms of the dual track of human-centeredness ( renben ) versus text-centeredness ( wenben ), certain literary phenomena of the 1980s are hardly reducible to such a clear-cut competitive dichotomy. Xungen literature, for instance, marks the emergence of a third category—the cultural unconscious—that merges into an uneven admixture of a burgeoning textual reflexivity and an overflow of ontological self-consciousness. To further complicate the picture, a fourth category, the hyperspace of Nature, which looms large in the literature, transcends the futile differentiation between the conscious and unconscious. A simplistic binary scheme will even fall short of framing Liu Zaifu. The same Liu Zaifu who foregrounds the liberation of humanity as the most effective means of resistance against the tyranny of political ideology also recognizes perceptively that the "cultural [ideological] tyranny of the Gang of Four is one and the same as the 'tyranny of literary style'" ( wenti zhuanzheng ). See Liu, "Lun bashi niandai wenxue piping de wenti geming" (On the formal revolution of the literary criticism of the 1980s), Wenxue pinglun 1 (1989), 10. In acknowledging the ''hidden constraints" that linguistic signs place upon cognitive activities, he anticipates Li Tuo's later slogan of "the Mao Style" and thus breaks down the prescribed binary conflict between the science of humanity ( renxue ) and the science of signs and textuality ( wenxue ). For the discussion of renben versus wenben , see Fei Zhenzhong and Wang Gan, '''Renben' yu 'wenben': Yige xinde wenxue piping fanchou sikao" ("Human-centeredness" and "text-centeredness": Contemplation on a new category of literary criticism), Zhongshan 2 (1988), 186-93, 116. Also see Song Yaoliang, Shinian wenxue zhuchao , 230.

13. Liu Zaifu, "Lun wenxue de zhutixing," 83, 93.

14. Ibid., 105.

15. On the process of aesthetic reception, see ibid., 117-18. On Youhuan yishi , see ibid., 112-13.

16. Liu Zaifu, "Lun bashi niandai wenxue piping de zhuti geming," 13. Emphasis is mine.

17. See Liu Zaifu, Xingge zuhe lun , for an elaborate account of his dialectic of complementary bipolarity.

18. One can detect a theoretical correspondence between Li Zehou's forth-right explication of tianren heyi and his implicit endorsement of the classical formula through his explication of the wuwo theory. However, although Liu stresses the aesthetic value of such a formula, he seems to be more occupied with transforming the substantive rationality underlying the concept of "unity of Heaven and (hu)man" into the instrumental rationality based on the Marxist humanization of nature.

19. See Lawrence E. Cahoone's critique of Adorno and Horkheimer and the Western theory of subjectivity. It is the subjectivist conception of the self that allows them to link the assertion and development of the self to the renunciation of nature and myth. Adorno and Horkheimer read the subjectivist concept of self and nature into all of Western history as the goal and principle of that history. Lawrence E. Cahoone, The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

20. Liu Zaifu, "Lun wenxue de zhutixing," 108-12, 140-41.

21. Ibid., 127, 112.

22. Ibid., 91.

23. Sylviane Agacinski, "Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise," in Who Comes after the Subject? , 9. In Western tradition, subjectivity consists in reappropriating the being-outside-of-itself. The subject proposed by Hegel is "that which is capable of maintaining within itself its own contradiction." Thus there is a common understanding that "the logic of the subjectum is a grammar of the subject that re-appropriates to itself, in advance and absolutely, the exteriority and the strangeness of its predicate" (Nancy, introduction to Who Comes after the Subject? , 6).

24. Liu Kang, "Subjectivity, Marxism, and Culture Theory," 9.

25. Smith, Discerning the Subject , 46.

26. On Chinese magic realism, see Lu Gao, "Mohuande haishi xianshide? Du 'Xizang, xizai pishengkou shang de hun'" (Magic or realistic? "Tibet, souls tied to the knot of the leather rope"), Xizang wenxue 1 (1985). On the two slogans, see Yu Bin, "Minzuhua wenti yu Zhongguo dangdai wenxue de fazhan" (The problem of nationalization and the development of contemporary Chinese literature), Wenxue pinglun 6 (1990), 52. Literature about Chinese literature and world literature was abundant during the second half of the 1980s. See Zouxiang shijie wenxue (Marching toward world literature), ed. Zeng Xiaoyi (Hunan: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1985); Meng Yue, '' Zouxiang shijie wenxue: Yige jiannan de jincheng" ( Marching toward world literature: A difficult journey), Dushu 8 (1986), 50-57; and Zheng Wanlong, ''Zhongguo wenxue yao zouxiang shijie: Cong genzhi yu 'wenhua yanceng' tanqi" (Chinese literature wants to march toward the world: Commenting on the planting of roots and "cultural sediments"), Zuojia (Writers) 1 (1986), 70-74.

27. Liu Zaifu, "Lun bashi niandai wenxue piping de wenti geming," 7.

28. Yu Xiaoxing, transcriber, "Haiwai Zhongguo zuojia taolunhui jiyao" (Records of the forum of Chinese writers overseas), Jintian 2 (1990), 99, quoting Li Tuo. For a detailed discussion of Li's thesis of Mao wenti , see chapter four, "Mapping Aesthetic Modernity," note 19.

29. Yu Xiaoxing, "Haiwai Zhongguo zuojia taolunhui jiyao," 94-96, quoting Li Tuo.

30. See Jing Wang, postscript of "The Mirage of 'Chinese Postmodernism,'" Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1, no. 2 (1993), 379-82, where an earlier version of this chapter was published.

31. Wu Huanlian, "Cong xuanze shengming dao xuanze Zhongguo: Tan 'Zhanwang ershiyi shiji'" (From choosing life to choosing China: Notes on "A comprehensive survey of the twenty-first century"), Dushu 3 (1989), 18-19.

32. "Tradition versus modernity" is a problematic raised in Gan, "Bashi niandai," 32.

33. This term was coined in Liu Zaifu and Lin Gang's Chuantong yu Zhongguo ren , 255-79.

34. The agenda of those who are remapping the "Greater China" changed over the years. Depending upon whom you are talking to—the Taiwanese, the mainland Chinese, Hong Kongers, or the Chinese diaspora—the agenda of the Greater China may be defined in economic, cultural, or political terms. Originally, "Greater China" summarized the vibrancy of the economic interactions in the economically, culturally, and linguistically compatible area of the triangle of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and Macao. In the 1990s, the Taiwanese are now less enthusiastic about the proposition of Greater China in favor of "marching toward the South[east Asia]." Yet for the mainland Chinese, the agenda points to the ultimate political vision of a reunified China proper and the China periphery. The continual expansion of the mental map of Greater China conceived by mainland intellectuals in the 1990s is thus not surprising. To echo overseas Chinese philosopher Tu Weiming's proposition of "Cultural China," recently some of them started touting an even more ambitious slogan: "A Greater China Cultural Sphere.'' According to this mapping, China is situated at the center of the sphere. The first layer of the sphere is made up of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao; the second layer, the Chinese diaspora; the third, other countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia. See Zhang Fa, Zhang Yiwu, and Wang Yichuan, ''Cong 'xiandaixing' dao 'Zhonghuaxing': Xinzhishixing de tanxun" (From "modernity" to "Chineseness": In search of a new pattern of knowledge), Wenhua yanjiu 2 (1994), 16.

35. See Tang Xiaobing, "Orientalism and the Question of Unversality: The Language of Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1, no. 2 (1993), 389-413. In this essay, Tang tries to account for the "signifying absence" of the Chinese response to Said's Orientalism . Although there is not much indication that Tang actually laments such an absence, there is little doubt that he reflects a general tendency shared by many scholars (comparativists in particular) in China studies: an uncritical adoption of the problematics ("Orientalism" is one, "postmodernism" is another, and "subaltern studies" is in the danger of becoming another) defined by Western academics as the overriding categories with which critics or historians examine or even rewrite the history of China.

36. See Tani Barlow, "Colonialism's Career in Postwar China Studies," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1, no. 1 (1993), 224-67. In this essay, Barlow traces the postwar sinologists' evasion of the problematic of colonialism in their treatment of the Chinese history of the Treaty-port era.

37. Gan, "Bashi niandai," 33. Emphasis is mine.

38. Liu Zaifu, "Gaobie zhushen: Zhongguo dangdai wenxue lilun 'shijimo' de zhengzha" (Bidding farewell to all gods: The "fin-de-siècle" struggle in contemporary Chinese literary theory"), Ershiyi shiji (Twenty-first century) 5 (June 1991), 125-34. In this essay Liu complains that contemporary Chinese literary theorists formulate their problematics under the shadow of foreign theorists. "The squabbles in Chinese theoretical circles are very often in fact foreigners' squabbles . . . rather than authentic academic debates among Chinese theorists themselves" (126-27).

39. Hu Ang [Huang Ziping], "Yu 'taren' gongwu: Weiji shike de xiezuo zhiyi," (Dancing with the Other: Writings at the moment of crisis—note 1), Jintian 1 (1992), 209.

40. Ibid., 208.

41. Zhang Xudong, "Lun Zhongguo dangdai piping huayu de zhuti neirong yu zhenli neirong" (On the thematic content and truth content of contemporary Chinese critical discourse), Jintian 3/4 (1991), 5.

42. Ibid., 3. The emphasis is mine.

43. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Selected Subaltern Studies , ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 12-13. Spivak interprets the attempt of retrieving subaltern consciousness in terms of the "charting of what in post-structuralist language would be called the subaltern subject-effect" (12).

44. The quote is from Lin Weiping, "Xinshiqi wenxue yixitan: Fang zuojia Li Tuo," (A conversation session on the literature of the new era: An interview with writer Li Tuo), Shanghai wenxue 10 (1986), 96, quoting Li Tuo.

45. The list of imported foreign works that exerted considerable influence over Chinese readers and writers is indeed a long one. They include Camus's The Stranger and The Plague , Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye , Heller's Catch -22, Beckett's Waiting for Godot , Eliot's "The Waste Land," García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , Borges's short stories, Sartre's The Flies and Nausea , Kafka's The Castle and "The Metamorphosis," Baudelaire's poetry, and many Russian novels. See Cao Wenxuan, Zhongguo bashi niandai wenxue xianxiang yanjiu (The study of the trends of Chinese literature of the 1980s) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1988), 12-13, 15-16.

46. Cao Wenxuan, Zhongguo bashi niandai , 240.

47. A Cheng's "Qiwang" and Han Shaogong's "Ba-ba-ba" (Da-da-da) (1985) are considered the most representative works in the xungen genre. As theorists, both played an important role in initiating the intense theoretical debate over the slogan in the mid-1980s. Han Shaogong's "Wenxue de 'gen'" (The ''roots'' of literature), Zuojia 4 (1985), 2-5, served as the manifesto of the xungen movement, and A Cheng's "Wenhua zhiyuezhe renlei" (Culture constrains humankind), Wenyi bao , 6 July 1985, laid the foundation for the argument of cultural conservationists that "searching for roots" signifies the glorification of cultural tradition.

The discrepancy between what the xungen theories propagate and what the narrative fiction actually delivers is intriguing. Whereas most theorists insist on cultivating their literary sensibility by nurturing themselves in tradition, what is reflected in the fiction gives the lie to such uncritical solidarity with tradition. As the critic Li Jie points out, most xungen writers' attitude toward tradition and cultural constraints is highly ambiguous. One can even speak of the collective critique in such works of China's homogeneous traditional culture. Li Tuo's observation is helpful in accounting for such a contradiction. He redefines the terms of contradiction between the theory and practice of the xungen genre as follows: "[There is] not a single work in the xungen genre [that] does not harbor the contradiction between its critique of traditional culture and its recovery of certain aesthetic traditions. This contradiction confused many people." So the pattern of conflict is seen less in terms of tradition versus antitradition, and more in terms of cultural values versus aesthetic values. See Lin Weiping, "Xinshiqi wenxue yixitan," 96, quoting Li Tuo. Also see Li Jie, "Lun Zhongguo dangdai xinchao xiaoshuo," 117-18.

48. On the relationship of xungen literature to xiandai pai , see Yu Bin, "Minzuhua wenti yu Zhongguo dangdai wenxue de fazhan," 53-54. Yu attributes the appearance of the xungen heat wave to the depression of Chinese modernism in the mid-1980s. He further reminds us (quoting another author) that "today's xungen converts were exactly those who advocated the imitation of Western modernists yesterday" (53).

49. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism , trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 118.

50. Xu Zidong, "Xiandai zhuyi yu Zhongguo xinshiqi wenxue," 33.

51. Ibid., 34.

52. Ji Hongzhen, "'Wenhua xungen' yu dangdai wenxue" ("Culture/root-searching" and contemporary literature), Wenyi yanjiu (Inquiry of literature and art) 2 (1989), 70, quoting Liu Xiaobo's argument in "Weiji! Xinshiqi wenxue mianlin weiji.''

53. Li Qingxi, "Xungen: Huidao shiwu benshen" (Root-searching: Returning to the phenomenon itself), Wenxue pinglun 4 (1988), 16.

54. Gu Hua, "Cong gulao wenhua dao wenxue de 'gen'" (From ancient culture to literary "roots"), Zuojia 2 (1986), 76.

55. "The reacquaintance with traditional culture is in essence a reacquaintance with the human subject itself." See Li Qingxi, "Xungen," 15, quoting Ji Hongzhen.

56. Ibid., 17, 19, emphasis mine.

57. Cao Wenxuan's depiction of A Cheng and Han Shaogong's ideological agenda—that of rejuvenating the Han culture—seems questionable ( Zhongguo bashi niandai , 243-44). Hu Xiaobo shares the view that the xungen writers are reactionary. Both fail to see the discrepancy between xungen theories and its practice. Han Shaogong's idiot antihero in "Ba-ba-ba" is considered the contemporary version of Lu Xun's Ah Q: the caricature of a corrupt and bankrupt tradition, or one might say, the consummate image of an ailing national character. Critic Zhu Wei speaks of the gaps between A Cheng's "original intention" to manifest the "harmony of Heaven and (hu)man"—a beloved tradition in Chinese cultural philosophy—in ''Shuwang" (The tree king) and his actual presentation of the intensifying confrontation between heaven and man. See Zhu Wei, "Jiejin A Cheng" (Approaching A Cheng), Zhongshan 3 (1991), 167.

58. Li Tuo, "Yijiu bawu," 71.

59. Most critics in China have come to the conclusion that the new cultural consciousness of xungen writers includes both "historical and national consciousness" and "modern consciousness" ( xiandai yishi ). See Cao Wenxuan, Zhongguo bashi niandai , 248; Yu Bin, "Minzuhua wenti yu Zhongguo dangdai wenxue de fazhan," 53; Chen Sihe, "Dangdai wenxue zhong de wenhua xungen yishi" (The "root-searching" cultural consciousness of contemporary literature), Wenxue pinglun 6 (1986), 27; also see Chen Sihe, "Zhongguo wenxue fazhan zhong de xiandai zhuyi," 86; Li Qingxi, "Xungen," 15, quoting A Cheng; Song Yaoliang, "Wenxue xinsichao de zhuyao shenmei tezheng yu biaoxian xingtai," 76.

60. On cultural reconstruction, see Ji Hongzhen, "'Wenhua xungen' yu dangdai wenxue," 70. On the vainglorious stance popularized by the proponents of the xungen theorists—that "Chinese literature is marching toward the world"—see Li Rui, "'Houtu' ziyu" (The soliloquy of ''solid earth"), Shanghai wenxue 10 (1988), 70. Li Rui is one of the few writers who problematizes that stance: "I did not know if Chinese literature ought to or would march toward the world. Neither did I know if the world is truly in need of Chinese literature as anxiously as what Chinese people wishfully thought it should be."

61. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

62. Here I disagree with Li Qingxi's interpretation of the metaphysical lessons rendered by Wang Yisheng's philosophy of life and Fukui's choice to remain the last fisherman on the Ge river. He perceives the two heroes as the incarnations of the " free personality that transcends reality." In another footnote where he explains the meaning of "self-transcendence," he adopts the critical vocabulary of phenomenology by saying that what the xungen writers deliver is the "return to the original state of life"—a prehistorical and precultural point of departure that is immanent, pure, and blissful. See Li Qingxi, "Xungen," 20.

63. Zheng Wanlong, "Wode gen" (My roots), Shanghai wenxue 5 (1985), 44.

64. Wang Xiaoming, "Bu xiangxinde he bu yuanyi xiangxinde: Guanyu sanwei 'xungen' pai zuojia de chuangzuo" (What I do not believe and what I am unwilling to believe: Regarding the works of three "root-searching" authors), Wenxue pinglun 4 (1989), 31.

65. Zhang Chengzhi, "Wode qiao" (My bridge), Shiyue 3 (1983), 240. Emphasis is mine.

66. Wang Xiaoming, "Bu xiangxinde he bu yuanyi xiangxinde," 24-28.

67. Ibid., 25. Gong Ping, "Zhiqing ticai de xinzhuti" (The new themes of the topos of "re-educated youths"), Zhongshan 2 (1988), 206.

68. Han Shaogong, "Wenxue de 'gen,'" 5. Song Yaoliang, Shinian wenxue zhuchao, 15.

69. Ibid., 289. A Cheng's Biandi fengliu series (Flowing with the wind wherever it goes) and Jia Pingwa's Shangzhou series (The Shang district)—published in the mid-1980s—fall into this narrative category.

70. Zhang Yiwu, "Disan shijie wenhua zhong de xushi" (The discourse of the Third-World culture), Zhongshan 3 (1990), 156.

71. Li Qingxi, "Xungen," 22-23.

72. Li Qingxi in particular indicates that the narrative mode of xungen literature contains the aesthetics of phenomenology, (ibid., 22).

73. Ji Hongzhen, "'Wenhua xungen' yu dangdai wenxue," 72.

74. You Yi [Meng Yue], "Yetan bashi niandai wenxue de 'xihua'" (Revisiting the problem of the "westernization" of the literature of the 1980s), Jintian 3/4 (1991), 35.

75. Li Jie, "Lun Zhongguo dangdai xinchao xiaoshuo," 117.

76. Yu Xiaoxing, "Haiwai Zhongguo zuojia taolunhui jiyao," 96, quoting Li Tuo.

77. Li Hangyu, "Liyili women de 'gen'" (Sorting out our "roots"), Zuojia 9 (1985), 78.

78. On the collective unconscious, see Fei Zhenzhong and Wang Gan, "'Renben' yu 'wenben,'" 189. On the consciousness of a communal moral character, see Li Qingxi, "Xungen," 21.

79. Zheng Yi, "Yuancun" (The village afar), in Yuancun (Taibei: Haifeng chubanshe, 1990), 25-161. Jia Pingwa, Shangzhou (Beijing: Beijing "Shiyue" wenyi chubanshe, 1987). The story was originally published in Wenxuejia 5 (1984). Han Shaogong, "Bababa," Renmin wenxue 6 (1985), 83-102.

80. Han Shaogong, "Wenxue de 'gen,'" 4. The emphasis is mine.

81. Li Qingxi, "Xungen," 17.

82. Cahoone, The Dilemma of Modernity, xiii.

83. Li Tuo, Zhang Ling, and Wang Bin, "Yuyan de fanpan," 78.

84. Smith, Discerning the Subject, 35.

85. Li Tuo, Zhang Ling, and Wang Bin, "Yuyan de fanpan," 75, 76, 80.

86. Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, "Wenxue yu yishu de qingsi," 2.

87. Liu Xinwu's complaints and condemnations of the younger writers' experiment with language are typical of the opinions of the older generation of critics. See Liu's "Zhongguo zuojia yu dangdai shijie" (Chinese writers and the contemporary world), Renmin ribao, 11 March 1988, overseas edition.

88. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, "The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics," in Who Comes after the Subject?, 64.

89. On the postmodern subject, see Zhang Yiwu, "Lixiang zhuyi de zhongjie: Shiyan xiaoshuo de wenhua tiaozhan" (The end of idealism: The cultural challenge of experimentalist fiction), Beijing wenxue 4 (1989), 11. On the premodern subject, see Zhang Xudong, "Ge Fei yu dangdai wenxue huayu de jige muti" (Ge Fei and some motifs of contemporary literary discourse), Jintian 2 (1990), 83.

90. Wang Furen provides an insightful analysis of the tendency of Chinese literati to prioritize theory over literature and art in his essay "Zhongguo jinxiandai wenhua he wenxue fazhan de nixiangxing tezheng" (Modern and contemporary Chinese culture and the characteristics of the inverse reaction of cultural developments), Wenxue pinglun 2 (1989), 14.

91. Zhang Yiwu, "Lixiang zhuyi de zhongjie," 11.

92. Wang Ning, "Guifan yu bianti," 160-61.

93. See Tang Xiaobing, "The Function of New Theory," especially 106-8.

94. Zhang Xudong, "Ge Fei yu dangdai wenxue huayu de jige muti," 83.

95. Zhang Xudong, "Lun Zhongguo dangdai piping huayu de zhuti neirong yu zhenli neirong," 3.

96. Meng Yue, "Su Tong de 'jiashi' yu 'lishi' xiezuo" (The writing of Su Tong's "Family chronicle" and "History"), Jintian 2 (1990), 84.

97. Yu Hua talks about his computation of fictive temporality in his own analysis of the temporal scheme of "Ciwen xiangei shaonu Yangliu" (This kiss was dedicated to Willow). He experiments with different arrangements of temporal logic—split time, overlapped time, and temporal disorder (mapped out mathematically as 1 2 3 4 / 1 2 3 4 / 1 2 3 / 1 2)—in the story to vindicate his fictional logic: "The meaning of time consists in its capability of restructuring the world instantaneously." See Yu Hua, "Xuwei de zuopin" (Hypocritical work), preface to Shishi ru yan (Worldly affairs are like clouds) (Taibei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1991), 19-20.

98. On the claim that the experimentalists have scattered history to the winds, see Zhang Yiwu, "Lixiang zhuyi de zhongjie," 6-7. Also see his "Xiaoshuo shiyan: Yiyi de xiaojie" (The experiments of fiction: The deconstruction of meaning), Beijing wenxue 2 (1988), 77.

99. Li Jie, "Lun Zhongguo dangdai xinchao xiaoshuo," 138.

100. Ibid.

101. Zhao Mei, "Xianfeng xiaoshuo de zizu yu fufan" (The self-sufficiency and superficial drift of the avant-garde fiction), Wenxue pinglun 1 (1989), 33.

102. "There has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject." See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 38.

103. Zhang Yiwu, "Xiaoshuo shiyan," 77. Yu Hua attributes all his efforts of writing fiction to his wish to "get closer to authenticity." See Yu's "Xuwei de zuopin," 5.

104. Li Jie, "Lun Zhongguo dangdai xinchao xiaoshuo," 129.

105. Wu Liang, "Qidai yu huiyin: Xianfeng xiaoshuo de yige zhujie" (Anticipations and responses: A footnote on the avant-garde fiction), Zuojia 9 (1989), 62.

106. I disagree with Wu Liang's proclamation that "experimental fiction is a chain of serendipitous literary events that are independent of each other" (ibid., 59). Hong Feng's stories, for instance, find so many intertextual markers in Ma Yuan and Yu Hua that they almost guarantee the working hypothesis of conscious imitation. "Bensang" (The funeral), a story told in a prosaic monotone, can justify its affiliation with the new genre much less on discursive than on thematic terms (namely the death of the father). Hong Feng, "Bensang," Zuojia 9 (1986), 2-21.

107. On dilapidated spectacle of history, see Chen Xiaoming, "Lishi tuibai de yuyan" (The language of degenerated history), Zhongshan 3 (1991), 146-47.

108. Yu Hua, "Xuwei de zuopin," 5.

109. Ibid., 7.

110. Zheng Yi, "Xunzhao minzu zhi hun" (In search of the soul of the nation), in Yuancun, 7.

111. Ibid.

112. Zhao Yiheng, "Yuanyshi he dangdai Zhongguo xianfeng xiaoshuo" (The metaconsciousness and contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction), Jintian 1 (1990), 81.

113. Mao Zedong, "Zhongguo geming he Zhongguo gongchandang" (The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party), in Mao Zedong xuanji (Selected writings of Mao Zedong), ed. The CCP publication Committee for the Selected Writings of Mao (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1967), 589-94.

114. Zhang Xudong, "On Some Motifs in the Chinese 'Cultural Fever,'" 154.