EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 49 Breuer Rüdiger (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) Theatre, Song and Performance in Three Novels by Mo Yan Key words: Mo Yan, novel, performative aspects, tradition, modernity Among the eleven novels of the 2012 Nobel Prize winner, Mo Yan, there are some which bespeak the author’s ongoing fascination with traditional and modern theatre, oral storytelling, and storysinging. While the focus will be on The Sandalwood Punishment (Tanxiang xing, 2001), this paper will also consider Mo Yan’s second novel The Garlic Ballads of Tiantang (Tiantang suantai zhi ge, 1988) as well as his most recent, Frogs (Wa, 2009). I hope to demonstrate that performance as a structural, symbolic and semantic principle is of utmost importance for an adequate understanding of Mo Yan’s novelistic work. Indeed, in the light of these three works, Mo Yan would appear as a playwright manqué in disguise. The Garlic Ballads is divided into chapters that function like acts of a play and are in turn divided into “scenes”. Each of these acts is introduced with a ballad or song by a blind singer. Untypical for the genre, Frogs concludes with a theatrical play in its own right, which accounts for almost a fifth of the whole. Although dispensable for understanding the story and only loosely tied to the plot, this piece, which was “saved” from an earlier version of the novel, “playfully” demonstrates how a story would have to be adapted in order to come to similar conclusions by way of different techniques. In Tanxiang xing in particular, life and history are quintessentially shown as a “play”, in terms of plot structure, language as well as interaction between characters: chapters are introduced by operatic arias, “characters” resemble role-types, performative behaviour is all-pervasive. Even the passages that come along as written in prose are often characterized by aria-like lyricism and patterned language. Beneath this performative surface level, we will detect a complex system of referential techniques with allusions to contemporary and current discourses by which the story is gradually being revealed to the reader and filled with meaning. Chan Shelley (Wittenberg University) The Frog, the Goddess, and the Children: On Mo Yan’s Frog and China’s Family Planning Policy Key words: China, Mo Yan, One-Child Policy, political allegory, Tiananmen Incident Since its implementation in the late 1970s, the controversial One-Child Policy has been enforced as a national strategy of paramount importance in China, while it has been widely discussed and severely criticized abroad. Indeed the policy has effectively controlled the rapid growth of China’s population due to Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) encouraging childbirth in the 1950s; yet it has also caused many social problems, such as gender-specific abortion, infanticide of female babies, sex imbalance, and the emergence of a special group of people, the shidu parents who have lost their only child for various reasons after they are past child-bearing age. Whereas pens do not often write about pills in China, Mo Yan, the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote about this sensitive topic very early on when he started his writing career in the 1980s. Themes such as abandoned children, unplanned births, and forced abortions from his earlier stories