Chinese Science Fiction Literature: An Aftermath of Historical Traumas

Vous trouverez ci-dessous le texte de ma communication donnée lors de la 11th International Convention of Asia Scholars à Leyde (Pays-Bas).

Introduction

As Michael Berry pointed out in A History of Pain:

Twentieth-century China represents a time and a place marred by the unrelenting vicissitudes of history and the repeated trauma of violence. Struggling to redefine its position in the world after the harrowing Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century and a devastating defeat at the hands of Japan during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, China entered the twentieth century only to face the collapse of its last dynastic empire in 1911. Since then, from May Fourth’s violent negation of the past (1919) to the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45), from the Civil War (1945-49) to the ‘great leap’ into mass famine (1958-60), and from the engineered violence of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) to the televised bloodbath of Tiananmen (1989), modern China’s trajectory has been one of discontinuity, displacement, social unrest, and historical trauma.1

Science fiction literature has thus been one of the by-products of historical traumas this century. Continuer la lecture

  1. Berry, Michael, A History of Pain. Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film. New York : Columbia University Press, 2008, 420 p. []