Wounds in time: the aesthetic afterlives of the Cultural Revolution

Huang, Yiju

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Description

Title

Wounds in time: the aesthetic afterlives of the Cultural Revolution

Author(s)

Huang, Yiju

Issue Date

2011-08-25T22:20:36Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Xu, Gary G.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Xu, Gary G.

Committee Member(s)

• Goodman, David G.
• Huntington, Rania
• Rothberg, Michael

Department of Study

E. Asian Languages & Cultures

Discipline

E Asian Languages & Cultures

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• trauma
• trauma theory
• Cultural Revolution
• China
• literature
• Chinese literature
• Chinese modern literature
• art
• Chinese art
• Chinese modern art
• film
• Chinese film
• cinema
• Chinese cinema
• Zhang Xiaogang
• Hong Ying
• Han Shaogong
• Jiang Wen
• Ann Hui
• Ba Jin

Abstract

My dissertation, “Wounds in Time: the Aesthetic Afterlives of the Cultural Revolution,” departs from the traditional historicist approach to the Cultural Revolution, contributing instead an investigation of the Cultural Revolution through its aesthetic afterlives. This study crosses disciplines and seeks to grasp the traumatic traces embedded within works of literature, art, and cinema that deal with the Cultural Revolution consciously or unconsciously, in lucidity or encryption. My analysis of the Cultural Revolution as a traumatic wound endeavors to bring the concealed political crimes, disavowed pains and absent feelings into historical consciousness. Figures central to this study include writers Han Shaogong, Yu Hua, and Hong Ying, artist Zhang Xiaogang, as well as filmmakers Jia Zhangke and Jiang Wen. Drawing on classical theory of trauma by Freud as well as works by subsequent theorists such as Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, I maintain that the Cultural Revolution is not a fixed temporal entity but a phantom that stretches beyond history, finding contemporary cultural avenues of expression, and rematerializing to demand recognition and reparation. Further, by means of bringing trauma theory into a new historical/cultural context, this study translates/revises trauma theory beyond its Eurocentric provenance.

Graduation Semester

2011-08

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/26247

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2011 Yiju Huang

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