Engaged Realism

Abstract

This essay examines Yingjin Zhang’s scholarly commentary on the practice of nonfictional artistic creation under the names of reportage (baogao wenxue) and (independent) documentary film (duli jilupian). Though reportage and documentary film adopt differing media of writing, moving images, and sound, I use two key articles by Zhang, published twenty-four years apart, to argue that Zhang identifies fundamental kinships between reportage and documentary (and other visual forms, like photography). Zhang’s work shows that nonfiction texts and images play a particularly important role in the formation and development of modern Chinese culture, and their further study offers us a deeper understanding of that culture and the unique workings of realism within it.

Notes

1 Yingjin Zhang, “Narrative, Ideology, Subjectivity: Defining a Subversive Discourse in Chinese Reportage,” in Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique, ed. Kang Liu and Xiaobing Tang (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press), 211–42.

2 Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Introduction,” in People or Monsters?: And Other Stories and Reportage from China after Mao, ed. E. Perry Link (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); Xiaomei Chen, “Genre, Convention, and Society: A Reception Study of Chinese Reportage,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, no. 34 (1985); Yin-hwa Chou, “Formal Features of Chinese Reportage and an Analysis of Liang Qichao’s ‘Memoirs of My Travels to the New World,’” Modern Chinese Literature 1, no. 2 (1985); Rudolf Wagner, “Liu Binyan and the Texie,” Modern Chinese Literature 2, no. 1 (1986); Rudolf G. Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992).

3 Thomas Moran, “True Stories: Contemporary Chinese Reportage and Its Ideology and Aesthetic” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1994).

4 Charles Laughlin, “Narrative Subjectivity and the Production of Social Space in Chinese Reportage,” Boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 25–46; Charles Laughlin, “The Battlefield of Cultural Production: Chinese Literary Mobilization During the War Years,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2, no. 1 (1998): 83–103.

5 Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

6 Charles Laughlin and Li Guo, “Reportage and Its Contemporary Variations,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, no. 2 (2019): v–xvi.

7 Yingjin Zhang, “Perseverance through Aftershocks: Epistephilia in Chinese Reportage and Independent Documentary,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, no. 2 (2019): 129–61.

8 Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First-Century China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 6–9.

9 The data in this paragraph are derived from the Documentary bibliography at the online MCLC Resource Center: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/bibliographies/media/other/#P; visited July 3, 2023.

10 Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

11 Yingjin Zhang, “Narrative, Ideology, Subjectivity: Defining a Subversive Discourse in Chinese Reportage,” 220–22.

12 Ibid., 215.

13 Ibid., 214.

14 Ibid., 234.

15 Zhang, “Perseverance through Aftershocks,” 131.

16 Ibid., 133.

17 Ibid., 136.

18 Ibid., 136–37.

19 Ibid., 144.

20 Ibid., 132.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles A. Laughlin

Charles A. Laughlin is Weedon Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience and The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity, and editor of Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. Laughlin’s translations of poetry and fiction have appeared in Another Kind of Nation and Push Open the Window, Pathlight Magazine, By the River: Seven Contemporary Chinese Novellas, and most recently Ma Lan’s bilingual poetry collection, How We Kill a Glove. His current research is on desire in revolutionary fiction and film, images of aging in Chinese film, and the diversification of Chinese reportage and nonfiction art.