| The Second paper I wrote for my Chinese Civilization class is below. Same format as the first one but new topic: "Profile the greatest writer of the early 20th century - Lu Xun (Lu Hsun) based on your reading of his short story "A Madman's Diary." Guess who didn't read "A Madman's Diary"...I did eventually though, as well as Nikolay Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" whose title was stolen by Lu Xun. Great writer..pfffft. Well, I didn't quite make it to the minimum five pages, barely four. So i added a picture of Lu Xun, his name in Chinese characters, and bam, 4 and 1/3 pages. Anyway, as usual, text of the paper regular style, TA's comments [like this] and my delightful insight in italics. Enjoy. As I read through "A Madman's Diary" by Lu Xun, I found myself struggling to obtain clarity from this seminal work. It was in fact Lu Xun's first short story, and also believed to be the first ever written in Modern Chinese vernacular, which was the language of the people, instead of the Chinese equivalent of Shakespearean English. Of course I recognized his ability, but I felt that something was lost in translation, so with that, (and also this very paper due pretty soon) [()crossed out], I decided to investigate further.[NO THESIS...?][avoid 1st person] Zhou Shuren was born in 1881 in Shaoxing to a poor, yet scholarly family. As traditional culture had not yet been abandoned by the Chinese, he received the usual education in the Classics and the Arts early on, as well as various other career-oriented fields. Sometime between quitting school in 1906 and the publication of "Diary," Zhou Shuren adopted the pen name Lu Xun, for which he is more famously known today. Before enrolling in "Chinese Civilization" here at USC, I was familiar with "The Diary of a Madman," but certainly not Lu Xun. "How can that be," one might ask; the answer lies in plagiarism. While Lu Xun was undoubtedly a gifted author, he apparently lacked the ability to create memorable titles. This assumption stems from the fact that he knowingly ("borrowed" the title of an existing novella by Nikolay Gogol, published in 1835. There are also Interesting parallels between the two)[()underlined] stories; each of their protagonists primarily fixates on a dog, then progresses into a more complete schizophrenia.[That's actually kind of interesting, BUT...] I think he's starting to remember how I fucked around last time. There are also large enough discrepancies to distinguish the two, however, where Lu Xun's subject believes the greater part of his acqauintances want to eat him, an obvious persecution complex, but Gogol's madman gradually becomes more deluded into believing that he is the King of Spain. Also, Lu Xun's "Diary" mysteriously incorporates no dates whatsoever, while those provided by Gogol become pregressively more erratic: December 8... Year 200, April 43... Martober 86. Between day and night... No date. A day without a date... Madrid, Februarius the thirtieth... da 34 te Mnth. Yr. yraurbeF 349 As I said, or maybe not. this does not detract form Lu Xun's "Diary" in the least, as his passage has deeper undertones not readily observed. As Dr. Sun (my professor) pointed out in lecture, the story is a commentary on the theory of Social Darwinism, within the context of China's shift from traditional to modern culture. In it, Lu Xun (cryptically emphasized the need for change in China and adopted fo use the personality) [() underlined] of a man who discovered an old friend's private writings. His madman wrote that "...history has no chronology, and scrawled over each page are the words 'Virtue and Morality.'" As he read, he "began to see words between the lines," as if he were the only truly enlightened man, and the society around him is that which is wrong. Here, Lu Xun's brilliance is most evident, for he adopts a cannibalistic society as the madman's phobia, at one time necessary for survival of a species, but totally unwarranted in a modern civilization. It was this work, and a few others that left Lu Xun at the forefront of the intellectual revolution in China, and he took the initiative in founding several leftist organizations: Left-Wing Writers, China Freedom League, and League for the Defense of Civil rights, among others. It is also well documented that he almost unilaterally incited the May Fourth Movement against foreign influence in China. Actually, I have no idea what the May Fourth Movement was about, but I don't think I lost points there. Everywhere else, but not there. He was ideologically similar to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), mostly in his conviction to the feasibility of pure Marxism, but to their disappointment, he never officially joined. He understood the masses and how to communicate with them, thus his chosen style and subject earned him much renown during his lifetime, and even afterwards (he died of tuberculosis in 1936). His works were embraced by the CCP, and even Mao, though Lu Xun's friends, disciples, and scholarly contemporaries were eradicated by a regime fearful of intellectual resistance. I really wish I had used "touted" instead of "embraced" back there. Dammit! That's why I got a...well, you'll see. Next Page |