Consciousness Of Cultural And Historical Specificities Embedded In Writers' Literary And Cultural Wo

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Consciousness of Cultural and Historical Specificities Embedded in Writers' Literary and Cultural Works

Wang studies Chinese women's writing in the early twentieth century. Drawing on Western feminist theories and methods, Wang focuses on what Chinese women wrote about their living conditions, on their vision of nuquanzhuyi (feminism), and on how they appropriated Western feminist ideas to serve their own political and social purposes.

Deploying a rhetorical lens that moves dialectically between the native's point of view and some major methods of Western feminist historiography, Wang reads two Chinese women's writings to look for and listen to traces and voices that otherwise would have been lost or overlooked. She argues that these traces and voices help contribute to the making of a Chinese feminist discourse.

More specifically, Wang shows us how two women writers, Chen Hengzhe and Yang Zhihua, deployed the genre ...
... of samven (the vernacular essay) Cartier Jewelry and the strategy of redefinition to challenge sexist assumptions informing the prevailing social narratives in the 1920s and to construct an alternative discourse for women in modern China.

These two rhetorical strategies, a result of Chen's and Yang's experimentation with the (old) vernacular Chinese (baihua) and their appropriation of features from the (new) Western essay, enabled them to communicate about their views of nuquanzhuyi and about their visions for women in modern society.

Wang points out, rightly so, that the emerging discourse of niiquanzhuyi as the Other should be seen as situated responses to the specific social conditions that Chinese women were subjected to in the early twentieth century, thus challenging and rewriting the existing cultural narratives (the importantly present).

Further, this new discourse owed its increasing presence and prominence to the then cultural encounters between China and the West that is, between the appeals to the external other by appropriating imported feminist ideas and the desire to discover and create new voice and identity by drawing from the indigenous resources.

Wu, on the other hand, turns her attention to the rhetoric of Post-Mao Chinese women's writing and to how they reject Western feminism in favor of Chinese humanism. Writing their lived experiences into contemporary Chinese imaginary after the Cultural Revolution (1976), Post-Mao Chinese women seek to awaken human dignity, to redefine women's position, and to create a literature of women and for women.

Failure to understand their subject positions has in part led some Western feminist scholars and intellectuals to misrepresent their work, and to deny any rhetorical significance inherent in their work born of their unique cultural experiences and of their direct dialogue with their intended audience. Failure of this consequence has once again called into question the applicability of the analytical paradigm that continues to dominate in mainstream literary theories.

In light of these challenges, Wu proposes to develop an enlightened feminist rhetorical theory in order to challenge Western feminist theories and categories, and to give much-needed expression to the consciousness of cultural and historical specificities embedded in these writers' literary and cultural works.

For Wu, this theory must be informed by a high degree of ethical responsibility; by total respect for the other; and by a dialectical process of critical Jewelry Store reflection that interrogates the dominant conceptual framework(s) and that is conducive to productive transformation.

It once again represents a dynamic engagement as it moves the indigenous Other to the center, and as it transforms the (foreign) importantly present. In so doing, it provides an interpretative lens through which we can move away from misrepresenting, marginalizing, or even maligning Post-Mao Chinese women writers; and we can begin to effectively perform transnational and cross-cultural literary studies through a rhetorical lens.