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Call for Papers

Chinese Literature: Conversations between Tradition and Modernity

The 2005 Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL) Biennial Conference

            In order to promote dialogue between scholars of traditional and modern Chinese literature, and to strengthen exchange within the international scholarly community, the Department of Chinese at Nanjing University and the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL) propose to hold the 2005 ACCL Biennial Conference at Nanjing University on June 23-26th. This project has received kind support from the Chiang Ching-kuo Center at Columbia University, and is expecting matching funding from the Higher Education Ministry of China and Nanjing University.

I. Statement of Significance and Impact

            Studies of Chinese literature have long been divided into "traditional" and "modern." Although there are some good reasons for this division, it has to some extent adversely influenced our understanding of Chinese literature as a continual entity and reinforced the May Fourth paradigm that has denigrated Chinese tradition in the name of "modernity." The result has been a general lack of communication (as well as some miscommunication) between both sides of this rather artificial divide. Traditionalists (with some exceptions) tend to consider their interests to be real scholarship, involving "solid" research, while regarding the study of modern literature as mere literary criticism. They criticize modernists for being influenced too much by "the West" (Western theory in particular) while neglecting the traditional Chinese values that are embedded in modern literature. Modernists, for their part, tend to criticize traditionalists for being focused too much on textual studies and for lacking sophisticated analytical and theoretical methodologies.

Meanwhile, there has been insufficient communication between scholars in and outside China. For instance, after postmodernism extended its influence into China during the 1990s, Chinese scholars welcomed its value in deconstructing Euro-centrism and Orientalism, but nonetheless found it ironic and somewhat unsettling to acknowledge that this critical tool came from Western scholars themselves. An exploration of this irony and its implications must involve greater dialogue between scholars within China and beyond China's various borders

The field of women and gender studies offers another example of the need for more substantial communication between scholars in China and elsewhere, as well as between specialists in "modern" and "premodern" literature. Fundamental differences seem to exist between prevailing notions of feminism in these two academic environments, and there are also debates about the appropriateness of gender analysis in the evaluation of ancient Chinese texts. Although generalizations about scholarly trends are always somewhat misleading, on the whole it appears that feminist scholars in the West are more radical, more vocal and proportionally more numerous than their counterparts in China. Moreover, they have somewhat different political and social agendas. Yet it is our conviction that there would be much more room for productive cross-cultural conversations if more opportunities existed for scholars interested in women and gender issues to meet.  

            To be sure, scholars in various disciplines have tried periodically to dismantle or at least interrogate artificial dichotomies between "tradition" and "modernity," or between "China" and "the West." As early as the 1970s, Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker, both historians, edited Reform in Nineteenth-century China (Harvard, 1976), with a conscious effort to "avoid a Western baseline," and to "clarify as much as possible how nineteenth-century reform related to what came before" (p. 5). More recently, the literary historian David Wang, in his Fin-de-siècle Splendor (Stanford, 1997), has pushed the beginning of the "modern" stage of Chinese literature from the May Fourth period back to include the second half of the nineteenth century. He argues that signs of reform and innovation that existed long before the May Fourth revolution "were part of Chinese contribution to global modernity," although they were "subsequently denied and repressed" (p. 1). In China, the famed scholar of traditional Chinese literature, Zhang Peiheng ?I�L�h|oe�e has just published Zhongguo wenxue gujin yanbian yanjiu lunji�f�õ? �œ�÷�r{OEA??�ñ�ñ?I`OE?�q�õ?_�œ�÷?W (Anthology of Articles on the Evolution of Chinese Literature from the Past to the Present; Shanghai, 2004). This work consists of path-breaking papers from a series of conferences he organized to explore the complex connection between tradition and modernity. 

            We believe that the time is now ripe for a large-scale international conference to bring together scholars of both classical and modern Chinese literature for direct conversations. The 2005 Biennial Conference of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature will offer an ideal opportunity to achieve this end. Established in the early 1980s in the United States, the ACCL initially focused on the study of modern Chinese literature, but it has later attracted classicists as well. Now it has three hundred members in America, Europe, Australia, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

            To have Nanjing University serve as the host institute for this conference would be of great symbolic and substantive importance, for its Chinese Department boasts outstanding programs in both modern and classical Chinese literature, and its School of Foreign Languages and Literatures has a special interest in literary studies. We have already gained enthusiastic support from the authorities at Nanjing University, but they need outside financial support to bring this ambitious plan to fruition.

            Both of us have had considerable experience in bridging the gap between "traditional" and "modern" literature, and between scholars in and outside of China. Professor Zhang Hongsheng, a scholar of classical Chinese literature, covers a broad historical span ranging from medieval times to late Qing China. After one year at the Harvard-Yenching Institute as a visiting scholar in 1999, Zhang organized the first international conference on traditional Chinese women's literature in the summer of 2000 at Nanda. The conference attracted over sixty scholars and resulted in a special issue of the leading Chinese literary journal, Wenxue pinglun �œ�÷�r{�œ]?_ (Literary Review) (Wenxue pinglun congkan�œ�÷�r{�œ]?_�ep?�˜4.1 [2001]), and a conference anthology (2002). Professor Qian Nanxiu, the incoming president of the ACCL, received her training in classical Chinese literature in Nanda and later received her Ph.D. in Chinese and comparative literature in the United States, at Yale University. She is currently co-organizing (with Professors Grace Fong and Richard J. Smith) an NEH funded international conference at Rice University, titled “Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and the Negotiation of Knowledge in Late Qing China.”  

            The proposed ACCL conference at Nanjing University will be the first international meeting of specialists in Chinese literature to explicitly  address the tradition/modernity binary. The two organizers will be responsible for editing the conference papers into two volumes--one in Chinese, and the other in English. We are quite confident that this conference and its ensuing publications will take conversations about the questions of "tradition" and "modernity" worldwide to new levels of sophistication.

II. Theme and Topics:

Theme: As the title of this proposal indicates, our theme is the need to provoke and sustain cross-cultural conversations about the relationship between "tradition" and "modernity."

Topics:

1)   The modern significance of traditional Chinese literature

2)            Traditional elements in modern Chinese literature

3)   Ming-Qing literature as a transition genre

4)            Conceptualization of women’s space in Chinese literature, past and present

5)            Chinese literature and conceptions [or constructions] of “Chinese culture”

6)            Literary translation and the conceptualization of the nation-state

7)   Asian Literature written in Chinese

8)  Literary theory and classical Chinese literature

III. Conference arrangements

Co-sponsors: Department of Chinese, Nanjing University

Association of Chinese & Comparative Literature

Host: Department of Chinese, Nanjing University

Date: June 23-26, 2005; registration: June 22, 2005

Venue: Nanjing University

Program: Paper presentations and discussions, including a plenary session consisting of a roundtable of 5 keynote speakers;

Day tour to Nanjing historical sites; a kunqu opera night.

Fee: USD$250, including: registration, hotel (one participant per room) for four nights, all meals during the conference, etc. We might be able to come to a lower rate for graduate students

Travel: Participants are responsible for roundtrip transportation.

Work Plan:

November 2004: Conference announcement and the call for papers to ACCL members

January 15, 2004: Deadline for submitting paper proposals (to nanxiuq@rice.edu )

January 31, 2005: Notice of acceptance of paper proposals by email. The host institute, Nanjing University, will then extend you a formal invitation.

May 15, 2005: Submission of papers, either by email or by regular mail for hardcopies. Papers should be send directly to Nanjing University (address will be specified in the invitation letter). Those who fail to meet the deadline are responsible for making their own copies and bringing them to the conference for distribution.

Working languages: Chinese and English. Please make every effort to present your paper in Chinese. If you choose English, please send a Chinese abstract along with your paper by May 15, 2005.

Publications: the conference is planning to publish an anthology of selected papers. You are also encouraged to submit your papers to Modern Chinese Literature and
Culture (MCLC) (for submission contact Professor Kirk A. Denton, the editor of MCLC, at denton.2@osu.edu).

For submission of paper topics, contact:

QIAN Nanxiu
Associate Professor of Chinese Literature
Asian Studies/Linguistics--23
Rice University
Houston, TX 77251-1892

Tel. 713-794-0603 (H)
713-348-5945 (O)
Fax 713-348-4718
E-mail: nanxiuq@rice.edu     

For conference arrangements, contact:

ZHANG Hongsheng
Professor of Chinese Literature
Department of Chinese
Nanjing University
Nanjing, China, 230091

Tel. 011-86-25-8627-1100 (O)
011-86-25-8627-6793 (H)
011-86-139-5185-8181 (cell)
E-mail: hszhang@public1.ptt.js.cn