On the brink of demise: anti-idyllic facets of two short stories by Shen Congwen

Title:

On the brink of demise: anti-idyllic facets of two short stories by Shen Congwen

Creator:

Andrš, Dušan

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:c1af2b15-cefd-4d6e-8d78-3f3c20d1ab09
uuid:c1af2b15-cefd-4d6e-8d78-3f3c20d1ab09

Subject:

short stories

Type:

model:article and TEXT

Format:

bez média and svazek

Description:

The article presents an analysis of two short stories by Shen Congwen (1902-1988), the foremost Chinese writer of the Republican period (1912-1949). The peculiar anti-idyllic quality of "Aboard and on Shore", a local-mood prose piece with marked autobiographical coloring, and "Sansan", an early example of the writer´s famous pastoral stories, is scrutinized using M. Bakhtin´s concept of "chronotop". Examination of the stories´ spatio-temporal layout reveals the presence of a shared semantic structure: the rise and subsequent demise of an idyllic space. The unstable chronology, a quality inherent not only to the two pieces under scruting but also to a series of Shen Congwen´s work from the late 1920s and early 1930s, is discussed as being possibly a product of the writer´s effort to express nostalgia.

Language:

English

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
policy:public

Source:

Archiv orientální | 2005 Volume:73 | Number:4

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false