Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Gaze: Lyrical Tradition, Intertextuality, and Political Culture

2021-03-07 - 2021-03-07

Publication Date｜2020-12-00
Authors｜Elliott Shr-tzung Shie
Press｜Socio Publishing
ISBN｜9789869947732

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Synopsis
It is well acknowledged that Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film has been indebted to Chinese literature, but few scholars have paid attention to the influence of Chinese lyrical tradition on Hou’s work. The foremost characteristic of Chinese lyrical tradition, as American sinologist Chen Shih-hsiang suggested, has been the subject’s self-expression of emotions and feelings and the texts that inscribe these emotions and feelings can duplicate or evoke them in the mind of the reader from another generation. Secondly, the texts from the lyrical tradition focus the lens on human relationships, in particular romantic love, friendship and familial bonds. Finally, the core of Chinese lyricism often involves the passage of time and the sorrows that time passes inevitably evokes. From The Boys from Fengkuei to The Assassin, these characteristics are not only manifested in in the thematics of Hou’s film but also articulated through Hou’s long-take aesthetics, including the use of static camera, empty shots and multiple-layered space.
This book intends to examine the ways by which Hou’s individual talent transforms and revitalizes the lyrical tradition of classical Chinese literature in the modern medium of cinema while at the same time investigating his film’s intertextual relations to masterpieces from Italian, Japanese, French and Hollywood cinemas. Based on the scholarship on Chinese lyrical tradition in Taiwan, this book hopes to extend its research scope to cover the film medium and thereby probe Hou’s film from a perspective that is distinct from those of Western film studies. Moreover, through the cast study of Hou’s film, this book attempts to reflect on the rediscovery or reinvention of Chinese lyrical tradition in relation to the regime and political culture in postwar Taiwan.
Keywords: Chinese lyrical tradition, Hou Hsiao-hsien, long-take aesthetics, intertextuality, political culture

Elliott Shr-tzung Shie received his PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University and is currently a Professor in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. His research interests include Taiwan Cinema, postwar Taiwanese fiction, literary theory and cultural studies. He has published academic articles both in Chinese and English, the textbook Film and Visual Culture: Reading the Classics of Taiwan Cinema (2015) and a monograph entitled Class That Matters: National Discourse, Gender Politics and the Representation of Capitalism in Taiwan Literature (2019).

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