Abstract
The literary genre of science fiction in Chinese literatures has historically been inextricable from anxieties about Westernization, national power, and associated debates over terminology. This terminology is deeply invested in the concept of classification and boundary-crossing, through which literary, ideological, and linguistic categories are invested with meaning and value. As such, I analyze how the epistemological genealogies of SF are lost in the English gloss of the both the terms “science” and “science fiction,” leading to potentially significant lacunae in comparative approaches to Sinophone literature. Most notably, the recent interest among Chinese SF scholars in “recuperating” an originary national origin for science fiction in China ultimately relies upon a universal legibility of form that flattens the often very different meanings of “science,” “fiction,” and “science fiction” between Chinese and English. I argue that “Chinese science fiction” is itself a formal fiction of a genre system largely defined and enforced by English hegemony.
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Notes
- 1.
David Damrosch stipulates two conditions for defining something as world literature: “first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin.” (6)
- 2.
The story of how Lu Xun turned away from medicine and towards writing as a cure for what he perceived to be the more pressing problem of China’s spiritual sickness and degradation is well known and frequently recounted, with almost as many interpretations of the event (from Rey Chow’s reading of it as an abrupt encounter with technologicized visuality to Ari Heinrich’s conclusion that Lu Xun came to identify with the microbes he had previously studied in slides) as allusions to the event itself.
- 3.
The unequal treaties (bu pingdeng tiaoyue 不平等条约) were a series of one-sided treaties between China, various Western powers, Russia, and Japan in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century in which China was forced to cede land, open its ports, and grant extraterritorial privileges.
- 4.
“Cathay,” in fact, is used poetically synonymously with China, such that “even China”—implied to be the furthest among “Far Eastern” nations from the revolutions brought about by the scientific method—is eventually altered.
- 5.
In his foundational 1985 essay on Chinese science fiction, Rudolf Wagner differentiates between fantasy (caprice, whim, fanciful invention) and phantasy (“imagination, visionary intuition”), arguing that Soviet literature, in emphasizing phantasy over fantasy, stressed the plausibility of the events being described, not mere possibility. In line with the overall argument of this essay—that linguistic change is often invisibilized in discussions of category and genre—I do not make a distinction between fantasy/phantasy, as such a distinction is neither foregrounded nor, indeed, apparent to most contemporary English speakers.
- 6.
Rey Chow addresses the assumption that binds the discipline of Chinese studies of a so-called standard Chinese. Chow notes that “Mandarin is, properly speaking, also the white man’s Chinese, the Chinese that receives its international authentication as ‘standard Chinese’ in part because, among the many forms of Chinese speeches, it is the one inflected with the largest number of foreign, especially Western, accents” (8). To recognize even the question of “a” Chinese language is to participate in a system of value that insists on a standardization understandable through English.
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Conn, V.L. (2024). Formal Fictions: “Chinese” “Science” “Fiction” in Translation. In: Song, M., Isaacson, N., Li, H. (eds) Chinese Science Fiction. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53541-3_5
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