International Symposium: Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May 4th Movement in China

International Symposium: Interliterary and Intraliterary Aspects of the May 4th Movement in China by Jeffrey C. Kinkley At Smolin ice, a romantic nineteenth-century castle 30 km. northeast of Bratislava which be longs to the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Marian Galik convened an international research conference from March 13 to March 17, 1989 that seems to signal a "second coming " onto the world stage of Czechoslovak Sinology in general and Czechoslovak modern-China cultural studies in particular. The glory days of the 1950's, when Jaroslav Prusek extended his learning and his own style of scholarship from Prague throughout Eastern Europe and even to the United States (which he twice visited), when Czechoslovak scholars of Chinese 1i terature spoke better Chinese than most of· their Western European opposite numbers, and when Czechoslovak Sinologi sts enjoyed unparalleled contacts with their counterparts in China, were terminated by the Sino-Soviet rift and the demise of Prusek and his Oriental Institute after 1968. Prusek's name was seldom mentioned in Czechoslovakia since, though his structuralist gospel was just then becoming fashionable in North America. However, under Prusek's student Galik (who journeyed to China and met Mao Dun before the door closed, and who has published four sometimes abstruse but always respected books on May 4th literature , criticism, and thought), Chinese studies quietly held out in ~ratislava. Today students in Bratislava and Prague are again being trained in Chinese and hoping to go to China to study. Anna Dolezal ova, another major S1ovak researcher on modern China at Bratislava, reports that Chinese is one of the most popular majors in the university, though some students are attracted away into English, since Chines~ is taught using English-language textbooks. Afterwards John Kowallis and I "crashed" the Lu Xun Library that Prusek built at the Oriental Institute in Prague. Though allowed only a quarter hour in the stacks, we found an impressive collection of dust-covered string-bound editions of traditional vernacular fiction and modern-bound books of fiction critidsm; books on twentieth-century literature were said to be few and housed elsewhere: The librarian allowed as how only three to five researchers currently use the library. Attending the conference were about 30 international scholars, a half dozen up-and coming young Sinologists from Prague and Bratislava (who often had been previously employed as translators for the Czechoslovak government), and over two dozen students, mostly from Bratislava, Vienna (40 km. away, but heretofore a world apart), and Prague. Key senior scholars in the field from the U. s.', Canada, 98 England, and France were absent; there were few scholars from Eastern Europe; the Chinese participants seemed to have been drawn from Czechoslovakia's old pool of 1950's and 1960's friendships; and the Czechoslovaks did not present papers themselves. However, the few major senior scholars present and bright young scholars from the U. S. and West Germany kept discussion lively and interesting. In fact there was a marvelously congenial mix of conference guests, though the papers were often of low quality or. unfinished, since they were not required to be submitted in advance. Yet there will be a symposium volume. The papers: M. Blasco (Naples) "The Crisis of the Family System and the Search for a New identity for Chinese Youth" Anna Bujatti (Rome) desses' of Guo Moruo" "The Spirit of the May 4th Movement in 'GodChan Chee Shing (City Polytechnic of Hong Kong) "The Impact of Japanese Language on the New Writing Style of Chinese Before the May 4th Movement" Chan Wing-ruing (Chinese U. of Hong Kong) "The Self-mockery of the Chinese Intelligentsia: A Study of Yu Dafu's Short Stories" Chen Yu-shih (U. of Alberta) "The Image of the Fallen Woman and the Making of Chinese Proletarian Consciousness: Mao Dun's 'Shuizaoxing' (1936)" Elisabeth Eide (U. Os 1o) "Traditional and Modern Variations on Konggue dongnan fei (The Peacock Flies Southeastwards)" Ge Baoquan (CASS, Inst. of Literature, Peking) "The Influence of Russian Classical Literature since the May 4th Movement in China" Jao Tsung-i (Chinese U. of Hong Kong) "Lianju and Logic: An EastWest Parallel" Jeffrey C. Kinkley (St. John's U.) "Echoes of Maxim Gorky in the Works of...