Ideology, Power, Text

Ideology, Power, Text
Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Total Pages : 333
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780804765190
ISBN-13 : 0804765197
Rating : 4/5 (197 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Ideology, Power, Text by : Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker

Download or read book Ideology, Power, Text written by Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The division between the scholar-gentry class and the “people” was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing/intellectual self and the peasant “other” a central concern of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created the “peasantry,” the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas. Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this primacy of language, the author’s main approach is the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed, articulated, and debated within the text. Three chapters each focus on one representative author. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881-1936), which initiated the literary preoccupation with the victimized peasant, is also about the identity crisis of the intellectual. Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), upheld by the Communist Party as a model “peasant writer,” tragically exemplifies in his career the inherent contradictions of such an assigned role. In the post-Mao era, Gao Xiaosheng (1928—) uses the ironic play of language to present a more ambiguous peasant while deflating intellectual pretensions. The chapter on the last of the four “generations” examines several texts by Mo Yan (1956—), Han Shaogong (1952—), and Wang Anyi (1954—) as examples of “root-searching” fiction from the mid-1980’s. While reaching back into the past, this fiction is paradoxically also experimental in technique: the encounter with the peasant leads to questions about the self-construction of the intellectual and the nature of narrative representation itself. Throughout, the focus is on texts in which some sort of representation or stand-in of the writer/intellectual self is present—as character, as witness, as center of consciousness, or as first-person or obtrusive narrator. Each story catches the writer in a self-reflective mode, the confrontation with the peasant “other” providing a theater for acting out varying dramas of identity, power, ideology, political engagement, and self-representation.


Ideology, Power, Text Related Books

Ideology, Power, Text
Language: en
Pages: 333
Authors: Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 1998-10-01 - Publisher: Stanford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The division between the scholar-gentry class and the “people” was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-centu
Language, Power, and Ideology in Political Writing
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: Önder Çakırtaş
Categories: Political Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019 - Publisher: Information Science Reference

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"This book examines the diversification of political writings and literature. It covers various disciplines, including political literature, gender politics, id
Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China
Language: en
Pages: 356
Authors:
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-07-28 - Publisher: BRILL

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China explores ancient Chinese political thought during the centuries surrounding the formation of the empire i
Ideology
Language: en
Pages: 268
Authors: Terry Eagleton
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 1991 - Publisher: Verso

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

‘His thought is redneck, yours is doctrinal and mine is deliciously supple.’ Ideology has never been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood
Ideology, Power and Prehistory
Language: en
Pages: 176
Authors: Theoretical Archaeology Group (England). Conference
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 1984-05-03 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book starts from the premise that methodology has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory.