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Modernism and Modernity in Republican China
초록
In this article, I explore the ideological and methodological relationship between modernism and modernity in Republican China in order to suggest my own configuration of Chinese modernism. The discourses of Chinese modernism have emphasised the lack of the material base in modern China and it is very different from the discourses of Chinese modernity which were relatively free from the question. Chinese modernism was understood in a direct but shallow relation with western modernism rather than being configured within the local setting of Chinese modernity. I criticise the dualistic logic of East/West and global/local and incorporate recent scholarly works that find fusion in the discursive and cultural production of modernity both in terms of time and space. As I configure Chinese modernism within the material setting of Chinese modernity, I highlight nationalism as the hegemonic feature of Chinese modernity rather than simply equating the material base as the socio-economic developments, which is also a relative term. In particular, I try to distance Chinese modernism from the romantic notion of the third world “subaltern” intellectuals and instead relate it with the literary and cultural elite. From such critical reflection, I define Chinese modernism as the literary elite’s ironical aestheticism of self-mocking or self-denial of bourgeois modernity rather than a truly resistant or revolutionary reaction to Chinese modernity, and such an ironical aestheticism is, of course, observed in western modernists too.