Abstract
The Humanities has always implied a promotion of reading as a constructive activity. As university instructors, text is our currency, and we invite our students to read literature, art, film, and other media, and to transform, through objectification, the world into text. This paper is a reading of the story “Sealed Off” by Zhang Ailing, also known by her English name Eileen Chang (1920-1995). Chang was a popular author in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai. By the early 1960s, mostly due to the work of literary historian C.T Hsia, Chang’s fiction would become the object of academic research. Short story “Sealed Off” was published in 1943 when the city of Shanghai was under Japanese occupation. “Sealed Off” describes the passengers in a tram car, including people in the surrounding street, during an air raid. Chang’s fiction is read as a literature of domestic spaces, in contrast to grand narratives of modernity. “Sealed Off” focuses on a very brief romance between a male and female passenger. However, this relationship occurs as passengers within the tram exhibit a kind of mass psychosis of readings, of text, of bodies, of faces, of the printed words from a newspaper left on a steamed bun. Chang’s story is an implicit reminder of the perniciousness of reading. Within a brief hiatus of a reconfigured everyday life that lasts as long as an imaginary love affair, reading becomes an inward and objectifying turn away from the terror of war and mortality.
Presenters
Sean MacdonaldAssociate Professor, East Asian Studies, Huron University, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Currency, Pernicious, To Read, Objectification, Air Raid
