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The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction. By XIAOBIN YANG. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. ix, 286 pp. $60.00 (cloth).
In the last decade or so, the critique of the Enlightenment has penetrated literary criticism in the China field. Although there has been a new focus on the everyday versions of modernity, the rage against the grand narrative runs unabated. This book is a welcome addition to this critical trend. Xiaobin Yang draws inspiration from the postmodern critique embodied by Jean-François Lyotard. The analysis is informed by a deconstructive reading that joins psychoanalysis with rhetoric and discourse analysis. The book is a comprehensive study of avant-garde fiction in post-Mao China and treats the avant-garde as a demolition of the official narrative of modernity.
This narrative began with May Fourth and culminated in the communist imperative of history. Yang makes a perceptive connection between the historical imagination and literature. Under the rubric of modernity and revolution, literature carries a reformist intention, a social agenda, a vision for the birth of a nation, and a criticism of social malady. He sees this line threading seven or eight decades until the avant-garde came on the scene.
The intellectuals took on the responsibility for the nation and...