Literature in question: Discourses about texts in imperial and contemporary China

Abstract

Can we think of the social life of texts without understanding the discourses that give them a meaning? As a way of revisiting the question about the historicity of modern literary discourse, we propose to oppose two discourses about texts in China: the discourse about wen in imperial times and the contemporary discourse about wenxue (“literature”). By doing this, we will attempt to identify the historical configurations in which these discourses organize and give meaning to texts. This will allow us to reconsider the historicity of modern representations of aesthetic experience.