Personal Narratives

This course explores the realm of private life and individual identity as revealed in forms of autobiographical writings from modern China. Ranging from the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and into the Reform era (1980s), our investigations will cover an eclectic mix of “personal” literature: diaries, memoirs, oral testimony, autobiographies, third-party anthropological reconstructions of individuals, and (auto)biographical fiction. We will encounter late imperial petty scholars, young urban women and their mothers with bound feet, peasants, radical revolutionaries, intellectuals, Maoist Red Guards, and factory workers. In a purely historical sense, the readings provide opportunities to understand the past by working directly with different types of sources. Yet, these personal stories not only open up windows on the lives and times of their writers but also allow us to explore the intersection between the practice of writing and identity construction, which some theorists argue is one of the distinctive elements of modernity. We will ask ourselves how these authors present themselves: What are their self-conceptions and self-deceptions? Where does their sense of “self” come from, and how do they construct private selves through writing? Why are they writing and for whom? We should even dare to ask whether these categories of “private” and “self” are even relevant. The rapid and often traumatic changes of these decades will cause us to consider how these people understood and situated themselves in wider society and the events of their time and, thus, will open up questions about the imaginative constructions of national (or social) communities that are smuggled inside these “personal” stories.