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4. Modernity: Aesthetics and Society

Readings

Please read the following texts :

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• Mao Zedong. "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and the Arts." Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present. Ed. by Faye Chunfang Fei. Ann Arbor, Mich : University of Michigan Press, 1999. 29-41.
• Fanon, Frantz. “On National Culture.” Postcolonial Criticism. Ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert et. al. London: Longman, 1997. 91-111.
• Adorno, Theodor. "Commitment." Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. 2nd Ed. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 103-113.
• Ding Ling, "When I Was in Xia Village." The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. Ed. Joseph S.M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 132-146
• ---. "Miss Sophia's Diary." I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling. Ed. Tani E. Barlow. Boston: Beacon Press , 1989. 49-81.
  

What to Look for in Reading

In countries going through the process of decolonization, as most countries in Asia did, the question of the political nature of modern literary texts, and the politics of literary form, loom large. Three essays in this week address this question: Fanon's is a famous account of the responsibilities of intellectuals and writers in the process of decolonization, and was highly influential in the 1960s in both Asia and Africa. Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yan'an Forum" advocate a certain kind of writing practice that stresses content and didacticism over form, and which we might associate with realism; Adorno, in contrast, avers that modernism offers greater emanicipatory potential, although he also implicitly questions the distinction between modernism and realism.

We'll illustrate this conflict with two stories written by the Chinese writer, Ding Ling. "Miss Sophia's Diary" was written while Ding Ling was caught up in avant garde literary circles in Shanghai in the 1920s. "When I was in Xia Village" was written later, after she had committed herself to communism and joined guerillas in the base areas in Northwest China, and in many waysrepresents an attempt to write according to Mao's prescriptions. We might thus might want to ask to what extent each story exemplifies the struggles over literary form discussed in our theoretical readings.

The Adorno essay is quite dense, and I've thus appended a brief reading guide below:

Adorno's essay “Commitment” is an important one, but it is also difficult. It was written around the time that the Berlin Wall was being constructed in Europe, when the Cold War was beginning to emerge from a Europe scarred by the aftermath of the Second World War. For Adorno, a German Marxist who was passionately committed to social equality, these times were very bleak. German culture, which had thought itself the most advanced in Europe (think of all those German philosophers and classical musicians) had produced the unspeakable barbarities of the holocaust. The Second World War had ended in a further horrific act of destruction, in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Furthermore, for a Marxist such as Adorno, the “People’s Democracies,” or socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, had clearly failed to produce the kind of free and equal society for which he had hoped, while capitalist societies in Western Europe, while perhaps offering greater freedom to the individual, were also based on structural inequality.

In “Commitment” Adorno, like Mao, is convinced that literature and art is powerfully motivational of political change. However, he comes to almost a directly opposite conclusion to Mao in terms of what kind of literary works might provoke change. Note that the essay asks us to go somewhat beyond the rather crude division between “realism” and modernism” that was introduced earlier—as all good intellectual work, it complicates the terms of the argument

Here are two different and complementary strategies to read the essay:

1. Adorno’s fundamental distinction in the essay is between “committed” literature (which he notes seems more politically relevant on the surface) and “autonomous” literature (which might seem on the surface to be less political). Take a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, and list the characteristics of each type of literature in separate columns. Which does Adorno finally favour, and why?
2. Adorno gives extensive discussion to the ideas of number of writers or artists: Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka. How does each of these figures fit into his argument—does he agree or disagree with their ideas or artistic practice? Consider also the examples of two painters: Picasso, and in particular his painting "Guernica," and Paul Klee, who moved from drawing caricatures of the German World War I leader, Kaiser Wilhelm, to the painting “Angelus Novus.” There is a link here to the paintings: how do they exemplify Adorno’s argument?

Last updated: 3 September, 2007