The Literature of Things: Ecologies, Disasters, and the Sinophone Worlds

Abstract

The phrase ren de wenxue 人的文學 often translated as “humane literature” is perhaps the most dominant paradigm associated with modern Chinese literature in the 20 th century since the May Fourth period. However, with the arrival of the Anthropocene, in which the human species is no more merely recognized as one of the denizens of the earth but as a geological, terra-shaping force, and the recent developments in technology that have radically transformed people’s relationship with the world, the very paradigm of “humane literature” needs to be updated to respond to the recent changes and provocations from the ecological and the technological.

I contend that “humane literature” as a literary paradigm alone is no longer sufficient to apprehend China’s relationship with a world whose fantasies and anxieties have drastically changed collectively. Therefore, my dissertation proposes a new paradigm at odds with the anthropocentric misconception of “humane literature,” in which ren (human) is narrowly defined via negativ—not objects, not animals, not ghosts, and in some extreme cases, not children and not women. Instead, I call forth a notion of the literature of things, or wu de wenxue 物的文學, that underscores human’s deeply entangled existence with myriad forms of beings loosely coalesced under the expansive word wu 物 .

I maintain that contemporary literature from the Chinese-speaking—or Sinophone—world is the most contested area where the issues concerning wu are brought to the fore; for the intricate literary relations amongst a selected group of Sinophone writers have converged (un)wittingly at common iii attention to or care for things particularly pronounced in their works published after the turn of this millennium. Though situated at the very end of their respective literary traditions, their latest and contemporary writings are indebted to knowledge from both Chinese and international literary and epistemological heritages in the 20th century, if not more ancient.

My transnational project considers a wide assortment of wu by juxtaposing them together: a dilapidated Shanghai mansion and a family workshop housed in Hong Kong’s tong lau (Chinese building), long-bearded boars in Sarawak Malaysia and an elephant in Taipei zoo, Malay Parang machetes to Japanese bicycles used in WWII, a shaman living in a post-earthquake village in Tibetan Sichuan and the recycled bricks used to reconstruct another village surviving the very same tectonic disaster, and lastly some virtual planets related to the Ming civilization and a cosmic hospital. Whether human or nonhuman, animated or manmade, physical or amorphous, these things at multi-layered scales with manifold meanings have fascinated a range of writers such as Wang Anyi (China), Dung Kai-cheung (Hong Kong), Luo Yijun (Taiwan), Wu Ming-yi (Taiwan), Chang Kuei-hsing (Malaysia) and Han Song (China), and informed their work starting from the turn of this millennium. Despite their divergent backgrounds and commitments, these writers all use wu as an elastic category to explore the reinvention of subject-object dialectics, the potential of fiction to illuminate environmental and social crises, and the effects brought about by the disappearance of the material world on humans and nonhumans alike.