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Books from Heaven: Literary Pleasure, Chinese Cultural Text and the `Struggle Against Forgetting‘ 1
Author(s) -
Souchou Yao
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
the australian journal of anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1757-6547
pISSN - 1035-8811
DOI - 10.1111/j.1835-9310.1997.tb00349.x
Subject(s) - heaven , pleasure , ideology , forgetting , reading (process) , constitution , aesthetics , literature , china , tian , philosophy , sociology , history , art , politics , linguistics , psychology , law , political science , archaeology , neuroscience
Chinese radical discourses from the time of the May Fourth movement to the Tiananmen incident have always indexed the complicit role of classical texts like Confucianism in the production of repressive ideology. However the radical erasure of such texts is by no means easy when Chinese pedagogic experience and cultural memory give significant cultural capital to the skills required in the reading of such texts. This paper is a meditation on the work of the Chinese artist Xu Bing whose Tian Shu or ‘A Book From the Sky’ encapsulates the contradictory performances of traditional aesthetic form. It is argued that a strategic rediscovery of classical texts can form a crucial personal project in the constitution of diasporic memory.