School of Social and Political Science

Description

Lu Xun is seen as the founding father of modern Chinese literature; thanks to the propagandistic efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, he was posthumously framed as a revolutionary fighter wielding his pen for the sake of the nation, and the revolution. This (re-)framing rested on political speeches appropriating the famous intellectual, on depictions of the author on propaganda posters, as well as on adaptations of his person and his works into Chinese comics (lianhuanhua连环画). In my presentation, I will sketch this process and argue that comics, as a medium combining text and image, were particularly well suited to this end, quite literally framing Lu Xun and his works from different viewpoints. As adaptations, lianhuanhua represent distinct readings of famous literary works – and as a genre of “pulp fiction”, they reached massive audiences, thus impacting how large parts of the Chinese population would read Lu Xun. I will show how lianhuanhua had their part in the styling of Lu Xun into a devoted revolutionary. Yet, time and again, lianhuanhua moved beyond the narrow reading of the CCP’s Luxunology, thus demonstrating that as a genre it is particularly well-suited to move beyond the narrow frames of official ideology, and that the texts of Lu Xun themselves defy easy readings and appropriations through Party ideology. Core to this are the ambivalences inscribed into the texts of Lu Xun, as well as the depictions of his eyebrows and moustache.

About the speaker:

Lena Henningsen is PI of the ERC funded project “Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx)” at Heidelberg University. Before that she was a junior professor at the University of Freiburg conducting another ERC project on reading practices in China (ReadChina). With a background in Chinese Studies, literary and cultural studies, she is interested in the production, circulation and reception of texts both as literary artefacts and as concrete material objects. She has published widely on these topics, including unofficial manuscript fiction from the Cultural Revolution (Cultural Revolution Manuscripts) and copyright infringements on the 2000s bestseller market (Copyright Matters) and is now working on a monograph on the adaptation of Lu Xun into lianhuanhua (Chinese comics).