講者名稱: Prof. Kirk
A. Denton
講者簡歷:
Kirk Denton specializes in the fiction
and literary criticism of the Republican period (1911-1949). He regularly
teaches undergraduate courses in modern Chinese literature in translation,
Asian American film, and Chinese film, as well as graduate courses and seminars
on modern Chinese fiction, the writer Lu Xun, popular culture, Taiwan
literature, and Chinese film. He is especially interested in the inception and
formation of a discourse of modernity in the May Fourth period and how that
discourse was to some degree informed and shaped by traditional concerns.
Professor Denton's edited collection, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings
on Literature. 1893-1945, was published by Stanford University Press in 1996.
Two years later, his The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu
Feng and Lu Ling was also published by Stanford. He is associate editor of the
Chinese section of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Literature (Columbia,
2003) and a coeditor of China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future
(Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002). He is co-editor,
with Michel Hockx, of Literary Societies in Republican China (Lexington, 2008).
He also edited China: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts, 2008). He
has published several articles on museum culture, including in The China
Quarterly and Japan Focus, and he is presently writing a book on the politics
of historical representation in museums and memorial sites in Greater China
entitled Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics and Ideology
of Museums in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Denton is
editor of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and manager of the
online MCLC Resource Center, which hosts the MCLC LIST, a listserv devoted to
scholarly discussion on the culture of modern and contemporary China.
活動摘要:
參考資料
Martyrdom and Memory: Monuments,
Memorials, and Museums for Dead Heroes
My concern in this talk is not the
psychological impulse behind self-sacrifice and dying for a cause; rather, I
focus on the ideological and political construction of martyrs and martyrdom.
Martyrs are products of religious, moral, ideological, political, and cultural
value systems and are made to contribute to those systems. I first consider
examples of martyrs in premodern times (e.g., Yue Fei) and of revolutionary
martyrs in Republican era history—and then examine some nationally significant
exhibitionary spaces devoted to martyrs in contemporary China and in Taiwan.
In the Mao era, revolutionary
martyrdom was developed into what one scholar has called a “cult.” As seen, for
example, in the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen square, martyrs
are central to the construction of the narrative of revolutionary history and
official state memory of the revolutionary past. In the post-Mao era, the state
has continued to foster the cult through the construction of monumental new
memory sites devoted to those who sacrificed themselves for the revolution. I
analyze some of the ways such sites try to make the message of sacrifice
relevant to young visitors, whose consciousness has been shaped by the new
ideology of market capitalism, and to a new historical trajectory of
modernization that seems far removed from the socialist revolution. I focus on
three such sites: Longhua Martyrs Park (Shanghai), Yuhuatai Martyrs Park
(Nanjing), and Red Crag (Chongqing), all of which are important lieux de
m?moire in Communist lore and which were constructed or substantially
redeveloped in the post-Mao era. These sites link the sacrifices of the
revolutionary past to successes of China’s modernization and its rise to global
prominence.
In the second part, I turn to two
Taiwan sites—the Martyrs Shrine (Taipei) and the February 28 Memorial Museum
(Taipei)—reflecting radically different appropriation of martyrs for opposing
political causes. Commemorating martyrs of the 1911 Revolution, the Northern
Expedition, and the struggle against the Communists, the former reflects a
Nationalist historical vision. By contrast, in glorying the martyrs of the 2-28
Incident, the latter denounces the Nationalist era for its white terror and
political repression. On the mainland and in Taiwan, martyrs are deployed in
similar ways for varying political purposes.
活動時間: 星期四, 十一月 26, 2009
- 14:00 to 16:00
活動地點: 綜合教學大樓9樓904室
主辦單位 | 國立中興大學人文與社會科學研究中心
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