The Rage for Postism, and a Chinese Scholar's Dissent

ISSN： 0895-4852

Source： Academic Questions, Vol.12, Iss.1, 1999-01, pp. : 43-53

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Abstract

In an age of scholarly communication by fax and electronic mail, North American academic trends in the humanities tend to travel around the world with accelerating rapidity. Scholars in developing countries often assume that Western scientific advances must imply a similar ''cutting-edge'' leadership role in Western humanities scholarship, and commonly approach the latest conjectural drift among the Modern Language Association elite with an attitude of deference that borders upon awe. Thus we observe one younger-generation scholar of the literature of the People's Republic of China ( PRC) after another treating highly dubious cultural hypotheses of the Duke neo-Marxist critic Fredric Jameson as incontrovertible theories. Xiaobing Tang of the University of Chicago is not unusual among his youthful peers in vehemently insisting that poststructuralist and postmodernist ''New Theory'' will inevitably dominate literary studies in China someday, ''like it or not.'' However, relatively dispassionate veterans in literary studies have countered by soberly subjecting poststructuralism and other postisms to the kind of critical scrutiny that Jameson and his eager disciples usually reserve only for humanistic and other non-postist approaches to literary study.