This essay explores the English translation and discussion of Tao Qian's (sic)(sic)((sic)(sic)(sic), circa 365-427) Chinese poetry by various translators and literary critics in the West. Arthur Waley, William Empson, Jonathan Culler, James Hightower, Eugene Eoyang, and others have resorted to Tao's one particular poem "Change of Seasons" (sic)(sic) to advance their ideas about literary theory, comparative literature, and Sinology. An old Chinese poem has gained new life in a continuous cycle of translation, interpretation, and circulation in the world republic of letters.

The chapter explores the theme of coming of age in so-called Sinophone literature at several levels. It looks at the development, maturation, and coming of age of global Chinese-language literature as a concept, a practice, and a field of research. It examines and contests the academic field that purports to study such Chinese-language literature under the rubric of "Sinophone." This self-positioning and framing of global Chinese literary studies within a postcolonial Western structure of knowledge deserves close interrogation. The chapter analyses specific examples of coming-of-age narratives from the global Chinese-language literature. The literary texts illustrate as well as question preconceived theoretical perimeters of what Sinophone literature might be. Special attention is given to diasporic transnational coming-of-age narratives, short stories, and the Bildungsroman.

This essay lies at the intersection of several fields: the study of the novel, world literature, early modern studies, and global modernity. It analyzes the representation of the outside world in the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (aka The Story of the Stone) from the 1f3th century. There exist frequent appearances of foreign objects as well as glimpses of China's trade with the West in the novel, and yet the literary work maintains a China-centered worldview. The essay situates the novel in the context of nascent world literature at that time and intervenes in the field of East-West comparative literature in the early modern period. The encounter with foreign objects and material culture is a shocking and exciting discovery as described in vivid details in this novel. Yet, China's ambivalent attitude toward introducing and embracing foreign culture results in the belated emergence of world literature on its soil.

This essay is an assessment of and a tribute to Yingjin Zhang's manifold academic achievements. He has made tremendous contributions to multiple fields: film studies, modern Chinese literature, comparative literature, urban studies, media studies, Republican China studies, as well as other related areas of inquiry. His scholarly impact has been enormous. The essay focuses on two aspects of his scholarship: First, his leading position in the establishment, institutionalization, and internationalization of academic fields like Chinese cinema studies, modern Chinese literary studies, and Chinese comparative literature. Second, his vital role as an influential, astute theorist in rethinking the theoretical parameters and critical tools of the aforementioned disciplines. While he was shaping and reshaping academic fields through producing monumental books, he was keenly aware of the permeable disciplinary boundaries of ever-changing critical terrains. Just as he was establishing Chinese literature and cinema, transnational studies, comparative literature, and world literature, he was at the same time re-examining and reflecting on the feasibility of these terms in a new critical context. A brave, open-minded, self-reflexive spirit is characteristic of his scholarship as a whole. He did not take an entity for granted, but cross-examined and redefined it according to changing historical and social circumstances.

This article adopts Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the chronotope to analyze the 2015 film Laopaoer 老炮兒 (Mr. Six), directed by Guan Hu 管虎 and starring Feng Xiaogang 馮小剛, exploring its representation and reconfiguration of the real as well as the imagined time-spaces of Beijing. Revolving around generational conflicts against the grain of a globalized and gentrified Beijing, Mr. Six creates a strong nostalgic appeal and laments the withering of mores from the past. The film not only attends to the physiognomic remapping of contemporary Beijing but also incorporates topographical imaginaries from the culture of the martial arts. By invoking hybrid sites of memory, Guan Hu mobilizes cultural legacies associated with Beijing and creates a palimpsestic urban chronotope. Furthermore, this article compares Mr. Six to its literary and filmic predecessors, probing its insights and oversights in restoring cultural memories and in capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary China. With gaps and conflicts on textual, contextual, and intertextual levels calling into question the efficacy of Mr. Six's exposé of China's social stratification and urban gentrification, the stories in, of, and around Mr. Six reiterate the coordination between cultural elites and consumer culture.

This article adopts Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the chronotope to analyze the 2015 film Laopaoer (Mr. Six), directed by Guan Hu, and starring Feng Xiaogang exploring its representation and reconfiguration of the real as well as the imagined time-spaces of Beijing. Revolving around generational conflicts against the grain of a globalized and gentrified Beijing, Mr. Six creates a strong nostalgic appeal and laments the withering of mores from the past. The film not only attends to the physiognomic remapping of contemporary Beijing but also incorporates topographical imaginaries from the culture of the martial arts. By invoking hybrid sites of memory, Guan Hu mobilizes cultural legacies associated with Beijing and creates a palimpsestic urban chronotope. Furthermore, this article compares ME Six to its literary and filmic predecessors, probing its insights and oversights in restoring cultural memories and in capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary China. With gaps and conflicts on textual, contextual, and intertextual levels calling into question the efficacy of Mr. Sites expose of China's social stratification and urban gentrification, the stories in, of, and around Mr. Six reiterate the coordination between cultural elites and consumer culture.

The theme of this special issue of Telos is the modern city in world cinema. Its various essays examine the depiction of cities and their constitutive contexts through the lens of critical theory, political theory, cultural theory, and film theory. The contributors tackle a range of topics: the experience of modernity in urban contexts; cities in relation to civil society and the public sphere; the metropolis and cosmopolitanism; the urban/rural divide; cities and gendered, racial, and class divides; urban planning and urban space; film as a particular medium, with specific parameters, in the broader age of media; film as mass entertainment and as revolutionary propaganda. Even with this wide range of topics and their themes, there are many more to be explored, herein and elsewhere, so complex and rich are the relations of the urban to the cinematic.

The term “transnational Chinese cinemas” first appeared in 1997 in the anthology Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. It was coined, theorized, and introduced in the book by editor Sheldon Lu. That was also the first time the phrase “transnational cinema” was used as a book title in world film studies. The immediate occasion for the rise of this concept had to do with the cultural landscape of Greater China and of the world in general in the post-Cold War period. Film coproduction across national and regional borders became a possibility again and was done more frequently. In the case of the Greater Chinese region of the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, filmmakers began to cooperate across the Taiwan Straits to make joint productions; they secured funding and established channels of circulation beyond their immediate territories. Simply put, transnational cinema is a cinema of border crossing, and transnational film studies transcends the unit of the nation state in film analysis. It can be understood as a model of film studies, a critical paradigm, a description of the film industry, and a type of film. The full methodological, historical, and critical implications of transnational Chinese film studies are first outlined in the introduction to the book Transnational Chinese Cinemas. Transnationalism is grasped at the following levels: First, the split of China into the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in modern history and consequently the coexistence of three competing national and local Chinese cinemas; second, the globalization of the production, circulation, and consumption of Chinese film in the age of transnational capitalism since the 1990s; third, the representation and questioning of “China” and “Chineseness” in filmic discourse itself—namely, the cross-examination of the national, cultural, political, ethnic, and gender identity of individuals and communities in the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora; fourth, a re-viewing of and revisiting the history of Chinese ‘national cinema’ as if to read the ‘prehistory’ of transnational filmic discourse backwards in order to discover the ‘political unconscious’ of filmic discourse—the transnational roots and condition of cinema. Transnational film studies have become a major paradigm in Chinese film studies, along with the models of Chinese national cinema, Chinese-language cinema, and Sinophone cinema. It shares certain assumptions with the other three paradigms but also has its own characteristics and differences. Transnational Chinese film studies have also evolved into a broader study of “transnational visuality.” Transnational visual culture includes feature film, documentary, video, digital media, and visual arts. This situation is especially relevant in the so-called ‘postcinema’ stage when the film medium, the platform of film circulation, and the venue of viewing have changed tremendously. There are also various forms of transnational films. For instance, there exist the commercial-global blockbuster, independent art-house film, and exilic transnational cinema. Transnational cinema emerges and flourishes in the age and condition of globalization and transnational capitalism. However, this does not mean that transnational cinema necessarily serves the interests of transnational capitalism. Such a cinema can be liberating and counterhegemonic as well, depending on the particular situation.

This article questions the usual claim that the first screening of Lumiere films in China was at Xu Garden, Shanghai, in August 1896. It discovers two events that have eluded Chinese and global film history. Maurice Charvet screened Lumiere films in the French Consulate in Hankou on the French National Day in 1897. Lumiere projectionist Gabriel Veyre showed Lumiere films in the French Concession in Shanghai in April 1999.

The chapter traces the evolution of the depiction of transnational Chinese masculinity in selected films directed by Hong Kong directors from the early 1990s to the present time. It focuses particularly on three films: Farewell China (Ai zai bie xiang de jijie 爱在別鄉的季節‎,1990), directed by Clara Law 罗卓瑶‎; Comrades Almost a Love Story (Tian mimi 甜蜜蜜‎, 1996), directed by Peter Chan 陈可辛‎; and American Dreams in China (Zhongguo hehuoren 中國合夥人‎, 2013), also directed by Peter Chan. Although the directors are Hong Kong directors and some of the films are classified as Hong Kong films, the films themselves portray male figures originating from mainland China. All these films tell the stories of Chinese nationals and their attempted journeys overseas in pursuit of some dream.

This commentary begins with a review of the status and development of the burgeoning field of environmental humanities, of which ecocriticism (literature and environment studies) is an important subfield. The authors call for more attention to environmental humanities on a global scale, beyond the confines of Western academia. The second part of the commentary discusses the individual essays collected in this special issue of Comparative Literature Studies which together not only reveal ecological consciousness and eco-writing as having been a vibrant part of East Asian culture throughout the ages but also promote new understandings of world literature.

My essay joins the revisionist project of rewriting modern Chinese intellectual history. The historiography of modern China usually foregrounds the theme of nationalism in the grand narrative of China's arduous struggles for liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. Radical breaks from the Chinese tradition or from the outside world have occurred in the form of a series of earth-shaking revolutions throughout the twentieth century: the Republican Revolution that overthrows the Qing dynasty in 1911; the Communist Revolution that leads to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949; the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); and so forth. Amid the fiery rhetoric of revolution,…

This article is a short introduction to the genealogy, theory and practice of Chinese ecocinema. It situates Chinese ecocinema in the broad context of a general ecological and environmental turn in contemporary humanistic and cultural studies. The article pays close attention to contemporary Chinese-language documentaries that embrace an ecological consciousness. Furthermore, the article zeroes in on a specific Taiwanese documentary: MyFancy High Heels ????? (2010) in order to tease out the contestation and tension between the environment, human labor and animals on the one hand and the nexus of global manufacture, circulation and consumption of commodities on the other. The conclusion of the article calls for a flexible transnational approach in ecocinema studies.