EVENTS

Contemporary Chinese literature has an intense occupation with memory and history which can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with its past. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, many contemporary writers have sought to inscribe their memories of China’s traumatic past and recount their lived experiences by digging into personal memories. Amongst the many literary trends that emerged after the Cultural Revolution, avant-garde fiction although short-lived, emerged as one of the most significant movements in the Chinese literary world in the 1980s. Yu Hua, a representative writer of this movement, made his breakthrough with the publishing of an avant-garde short story – On the Road at Age Eighteen (十八岁出门远行) – in 1987. The speaker will discuss memory writing in contemporary Chinese literature in the 1980s through a close-reading of Yu Hua’s short story 1986 (一九八六年), and analyse the representation of memory, history and trauma in this story.

Speaker

Tanvi Negi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese Studies, School of Languages, Doon University, Uttarakhand, India. She is currently pursuing her PhD from the Centre for Chinese and South East Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. As a recipient of the 2023 ICS-HYI doctoral fellowship, she was a visiting research scholar at East China Normal University in Shanghai, PRC and a visiting fellow at Harvard-Yenching Institute for the academic years 2023-24 and 2024-25 respectively. She has translated a Chinese novel “骆驼祥子” (Rickshaw Boy) by Lao She from Chinese to Hindi (रिक्शावाला) published by the National Book Trust in 2019. Her research interests include Chinese language and culture, teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, modern and contemporary Chinese literature, translation studies and memory studies.

Chair

Manju Rani Hara is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Chinese and South East Asian Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis was on Literary Activism in China in the 1980s and 1990s: A Case Study of Wang Anyi and Wang Shuo. Her research interests are modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese society and culture, gender relations and Chinese media.

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