Tone and the Moral Imagination: An Anthropological Look at Chinese Literary Essay Battles | Zendy

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Tone and the Moral Imagination: An Anthropological Look at Chinese Literary Essay Battles

Author(s) -

Scoggin Mary

Publication year - 2000

Publication title -

anthropology and humanism

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153

H-Index - 17

eISSN - 1548-1409

pISSN - 1559-9167

DOI - 10.1525/ahu.2000.25.2.158

Subject(s) - tone (literature) , metaphor , criticism , communitas , solipsism , normative , aesthetics , sociology , literature , art , philosophy , epistemology , linguistics , liminality

This essay examines the function of "tone," an organizing metaphor that captures "expressions of mood" in a particular genre of cultural criticism, through the lens of a literary debate over tone between two newspaper editors. Over the span of 50 years, this debate concerns a specific type of essays called zawen, which are frequently published in Chinese media, and which operate as moral commentary upon the times. The two positions on tone display a classic division between spontaneous communitas, a revolutionary force, and the recapture of that force for normative communitas, a conservative force.

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