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XiaobingTang. Chinese Modern:The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. xiii + 380 pp.
Aiming at a general readership of literary scholars, as well as Chinese specialists, Chinese Modern is both a noteworthy attempt to bring the experiences of Chinese modernity to bear on theoretical discourses of modernity and a dexterous use of western theories to illuminate the workings of modernity in Chinese literature and culture. It offers close analysis or "intimate readings" of selected literary and visual texts rather than a narrative history of the twists and turns of modern Chinese culture. Lest these readings be dismissed as a "postmodern" hodgepodge, Tang stresses the grounding of his project in history, seen now as "uneven and multifocal." Each of the seemingly randomly selected texts, he argues, is in fact "an overdetermined historical intervention that provides a crucial link in modern Chinese literary and cultural practices," even if they do not easily cohere into a uniform historical narrative. Connecting the apparently disparate narratives is what Tang calls the dialectics of the heroic and the quotidian, a concept that not only provides an interpretive framework but also denotes "an inescapable condition of secular modernity" under which a structure of ambivalence is maintained between passions for a Utopian future and longings for a fulfilling everyday life.
It is not difficult to see how Tang's conception of such a dialectics is informed by the particular historical experiences of...