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Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman” and a Chinese Modernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Xiaobing Tang
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Abstract

A critical rereading of Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman,” a canonical text in modern Chinese literature, suggests a need to invoke modernism as a historicizing concept and to rethink modern Chinese literary historiography. Contrary to the conventional view of Lu Xun's story as no more than a realist fiction, the new interpretation shows how the work persistently and ingeniously articulates a modernist sensibility of time as well as a modernist politics of language. The Madman's madness not only expresses a self-consciousness that is radically modern in its break with a traditional gemeinschaft but also demarcates a new, oppositional symbolic order and practice. At the forefront of the historical New Culture movement, this archetypal text of deconstructive reading simultaneously promises a critical and a productive discursive strategy. The work's modernism, finally, requires modernity to be understood as both a concrete historical experience and a global situation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 5 , October 1992 , pp. 1222 - 1234
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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