Literary Remains: Death, Trauma, and Lu Xun's Refusal to Mourn

Lu Xun (1881-1936), twentieth-century China's greatest writer, is commonly cast in the mold of a radical iconoclast who rejected traditional culture. Challenging conventional depictions, Literary Remains captures Lu Xun's disenchantment with modernity and illuminates his transformative engagements with tradition in his "modern" experimental works. Lurking behind the ambiguity at the heart of his writings are larger questions on the effects of cultural exchange, accommodation, and transformation that Lu Xun grappled with as a writer: How can a culture estranged from its vanishing traditions come to terms with its past? How can a culture, severed from its roots and alienated from the foreign conventions it appropriates, conceptualize its own present and future?

Through innovative intertextual readings and sophisticated analyses, Cheng shows how Lu Xun's creative writings--which imitate, adapt, and parody traditional literary conventions--represent and mirror the trauma of cultural disintegration, in content and in form. His contradictory, uncertain, and sometimes bizarrely incoherent narratives refuse to conform to conventional modes of meaning-making, opening up imaginative possibilities for comprehending the past and present without necessarily reifying them. Literary Remains insightfully reveals how Lu Xun's literary enterprise is driven by a radical hope--that in spite of the destruction he witnessed and the limits of representation, his writings might capture glimmers of the past and the present, to illuminate a future yet to unfold.