Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Despite its high price ($104 hardback, $55 ebook), Shelley Chan's scholarly commentary on Mo Yan in her Subversive Voice is quite an important work. It is, in its own way - from Chan's ideological position - considerably insightful for anyone seriously studying Mo's writings. In Lenin's red pedagogy of critique, her text is important because it "facilitates an understanding of the political essence of developments" in Mo's fictional world as reflected through "the arguments of . . . radical democrats" - like Chan - who sincerely contend that Moism (Mo-ism) is "subversive" (Lenin, "Learn" 60) [2]. Howard Goldblatt, in his auspicious foreword to Chan's book on "China's most popular and widely read novelist," points out that Chan's "sophisticated literary analysis reveals aspects, sometimes hidden, that go to the core of Mo Yan's literary project"; it is a work which is "not uncritical in her in-depth study" and is "the perfect complement to [our] reading of Mo Yan's novels" (Subversive, Foreword, emphasis added) [3].
Repository Citation
Xie, Jerry. "Hard Core: Shelley Chan's "Not Uncritical" Mo Yan Thought (Part One of Three)." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol15/iss2/9