100th Anniversary of Lu Xun's 'A World's Madman' скачать в хорошем качестве

100th Anniversary of Lu Xun's 'A World's Madman'

Abstract: Lu Xun (1881-1936) is one of the greatest writers in 20th-century Chinese literature. His, A Madman’s Diary (1918) is the first short story in the modern Chinese literature, written in vernacular style. The short story is also considered a milestone fiction – the first piece of fiction written in the revolutionary realism tradition. The story was first published in the New Youth magazine. The story is often described as exposing the ‘cannibalistic feudal society’ of pre-revolutionary China. A Madman’s Diary condemns the oppressive nature of Chinese Confucian culture as a ‘man-eating society’, where the strong devours the weak. The Madman’s reading of ancient classical texts to discover evidence of cannibalism is a parody of traditional Confucian scholarship. Realistically speaking, Lu Xun’s madman is actually a rebel and social critic whose madness is a kind of sanity. As early as in 1954, in the formative years of a new, revolutionary China, the writer Xu Zhongyu had advocated that Lu Xun’s madman “is not a mad person, but he is a warrior hero who fought feudalism”. The well-known Russian Sinologist Semenov believed that many Chinese fiction writers in the early 1920s liked to accidentally find someone’s manuscript to enhance the story’s authenticity. The author of A Madman’s Diary too made a similar claim and obtained the same artistic effect. Japan’s Kiyama Hideo too had nearly echoed Semenov’s sentiments Lu Xun was once described by Mao Zedong as modern Chinese sage. Interestingly, a young Chinese writer recently wrote: “It is sad that we still need Lu Xun in China today.” The panel discussion aims to bring together a group of eminent Lu Xun scholars from India and abroad, to deliberate upon the relevance of Lu Xun, the writer, as well as of A Madman’s Diary in China and world literature today. About the Speakers Prof. Senno Takumasa is a Professor and the Head of the Department of Chinese Literature and Linguistics in Waseda University. He graduated from Waseda University, the Department of Chinese Literature in 1979. He completed his master and doctoral course in Tokyo Metropolitan University, the Department of Chinese literature. Dr. Roman Shapiro teaches Chinese Translation, History of Chinese Literature and other philological subjects. He taught at a number of universities in Russia and abroad and was a Board Member of the European Association of Chinese Studies and the European Association of Chinese Linguistics. He published research papers on Chinese literature, philology and culture. Mr. Taku Kurashige is a lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University. Dr. Emily Mae Graf works at Heidelberg University as Assistant Professor (Assistentin) at the Institute of Chinese Studies. Dr. Raman P. Sinha teaches Sanskrit Poetics, Western Literary Theory, Hindi Drama and Theatre, Philosophy of literary History at the Centre of Indian Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published three books besides several articles and research papers. He has also translated more than two hundred poems and some prose pieces from English and from different Indian languages and vice versa. His area of interests includes Hindi studies, Translation studies, Culture studies and Performing arts. Dr. Hemant Adlakha is Professor of Chinese and the Ex-Chairperson, the Centre for Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies (CCSEAS), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS) Delhi. His areas of research include Political discourse in the P R China, Chinese literature, culture and cinema. His PhD dissertation was on ‘Modernization and the State in Contemporary China: Search for a Distant Civil Society’. His present work looks at Lu Xun in contemporary China, East Asia and the world. He has published articles in Chinese and in English. He is a member, International Editorial Committee, International Society for Lu Xun Studies, Seoul (ROK). His most recent publications include, ‘Confucius’ in Encyclopedia of Rrace and Racism, 2nd Edition, Gale Cengage Learning, Macmillan Reference, USA. He is currently working on a book entitled “The Poetics of Change: Lu Xun’s Relevance and Influence on East Asian Modernity”. He has recently, in collaboration with Dr. Raman Sinha, Centre for Indian Languages, JNU, has completed a Chinese - Hindi translation of Lu Xun’s prose poetry collection Wild Grass (forthcoming 2018-19). Dr. Adlakha has also translated Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary from Chinese into Hindi (forthcoming 2018-19). He regularly contributes articles to journals and news magazines such as China Report, The Diplomat etc.