Rites of revolution : Chinese revolutionary aesthetics as ritual practice
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Rites of Revolution: Chinese Revolutionary Aesthetics as Ritual Practice argues that revolutionary literature and performance should be approached as forms of secular religious ritual. Placing the Cultural Revolution within a longer revolutionary history, and working across media (including the novel, film, opera, and ballet) as well as with diaries and later memoirs, my project demonstrates the centrality of narrative to historical conceptions of Chinese modernity. I show how a socialist philosophy of history emerged from an earlier Chinese discourse of modernity that was explicitly explored in literary texts. This teleological worldview of progressive history came to be gradually encoded into a masterplot that crossed genres and media as it developed in the mid-twentieth century. Informed by work on Soviet aesthetics and in conversation with work on the Cultural Revolution in literature, history, anthropology, and religious studies, I demonstrate that the ritual forms of revolutionary works sought to symbolically reconstruct the world in order to transform it. Engaging a larger question of the role and nature of literature within society, my interpretation of cultural production as a staging of quasi-religious performance addresses the tension between art's aesthetic value and its social utility. By placing literary texts at the intersection of competing philosophies of history and subjectivity, my research provides a particular praxis for the discussion of politics formed through the aesthetics of charismatic rule and aesthetics as a political method for the conditioning of individual consciousness. The role of narrative as both metaphor (for life) and metonym (for a theory of history) joins the interpretive lines of politics and aesthetics and forms the foundation of my argument for the particularly literary roots of Maoist cultural politics.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Parker, Lauren Andrase Eidal |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Wang, Ban, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Wang, Ban, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Lee, Haiyan |
| Thesis advisor | Palumbo-Liu, David |
| Degree committee member | Lee, Haiyan |
| Degree committee member | Palumbo-Liu, David |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Lauren Parker. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Lauren Andrase Eidal Parker
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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