|
Ross Perlin:Hockx has documented a fascinating moment in time. Geremie R Barmé, creator of The China Story (www.thechinastory.org):This important account of the other China is timely and incisive. It reveals a virtual People's Republic that is furtive, creative, and resilient. Hockx speaks insightfully of China's post-socialist past and guides us toward its gravid and disruptive future. Lydia H. Liu, author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious:Michel Hockx provides a rare look at the processes of social transformation that have touched the intimate lives of people and communities through web portals, apps, microblogs and other online media. His refreshing ethnography captures a precarious moment of postsocialist literary innovation, transgression, and aberrations in its full complexity. This book is the best introduction available in English to the psychic landscape of contemporary Chinese netizens who know how to play with censors to articulate their personal desires, fantasies, phobias, and exhibitionism. N. Katherine Hayles, author of How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis:Internet Literature in China is one of the first books to survey the field of electronic literature in China, and Hockx's analyses show the complex interrelations between literary production, internet technologies, and social contexts in postsocialist China. His conclusions challenge and extend received wisdom about how digital technologies affect literary productions in Western contexts. For example, he argues that innovative effects do not require and are not limite Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China--and across Asia
|
